Why the “part-time talent is second-best” myth is costing employers their best people – and quietly holding brilliant women back.
Let’s start with the sentence that ends careers before they’ve even restarted.
“We’re really looking for someone full-time.”
You’ve heard it. Maybe you’ve said it. It slips out in interviews, on calls with recruiters, in the quiet moment after you ask about compressed hours and watch someone’s face change.
And underneath it sits an assumption so old and so unquestioned that most people never say it out loud:
That part-time means less serious.
Less committed.
Less ambitious.
Second-best.
I want to take that assumption apart – piece by piece – because it isn’t just unfair. It’s wrong. And it’s costing employers the very people they claim they can’t find.
The myth, said plainly
Here’s the belief, dragged into the daylight where we can look at it properly.
Somewhere along the way, we decided that commitment is measured in hours. That the person at their desk for ten hours must care more than the person there for five. That “gives everything to the job” means gives time to the job – as much of it as humanly possible, ideally with a bit of evening and weekend thrown in.
So when someone asks to work three days instead of five, we don’t hear “I’d like to do this brilliantly in the hours that fit my life.”
We hear “I’d like to do less.”
And once you’ve decided someone wants to do less, everything else follows. You pass them over for the stretch project. You don’t put them forward for promotion. You quietly file them under “reliable, but not one to watch.”
It’s rarely said. It doesn’t need to be. It just happens – in a thousand small decisions, to thousands of capable people, most of them women.
But here’s the thing nobody stops to check.
The belief isn’t true.
Parkinson’s Law, or why full days aren’t full
There’s a principle you might have heard of. It’s called Parkinson’s Law, and it says this:
Work expands to fill the time available for it.
Give yourself two hours to write a report, and it takes two hours. Give yourself a full day, and – funny thing – it somehow takes the whole day. Same report. Same brain. Wildly different amounts of time, purely because the time was there to be filled.
Now hold that up against a full-time working week.
Be honest. How much of a standard eight-hour day is actually work?
The meeting that should have been an email. The other meeting, about the first meeting. The 3 pm slump where nothing much happens, but leaving isn’t an option, so you hover — half-working, half-scrolling, fully present and barely productive. The task that could take an hour, gently stretched across an afternoon because the clock says you’ve got until 5:30 anyway.
None of this is a criticism of the people doing it. It’s just what happens when you measure work by hours seated rather than things done. The hours get filled. That’s the whole point of Parkinson’s Law. It’s not a flaw in certain people. It’s how time works when there’s too much of it.
Now look at the part-timer.
The parent with a 3 pm pick-up doesn’t have a 3 pm slump. There’s no hovering, no stretching, no “I’ll just look busy until home time.” Every minute is spoken for, because at 3 pm the door shuts, whether the work is done or not.
So the work gets done.
Focused. Fast. Ruthlessly prioritised. The urgent is separated from the noise, because there’s no time to treat everything as equally important.
Ask anyone who’s managed a strong part-time team member and they’ll tell you the same thing: nobody works harder than a parent with a deadline they physically cannot miss.
That’s no less committed.
That’s commitment with the waffle stripped out.
“Committed” was always the wrong word
Let’s go further, because I think the whole framing is broken.
When an employer says they want someone “committed,” what do they actually want?
They want the work done well. They want someone who cares about the outcome. Someone reliable, who takes ownership, who doesn’t need chasing, who thinks about the job even when they’re not being watched.
Notice what’s not on that list.
Hours.
Nowhere in “I want someone who does brilliant work and cares about it” is there a requirement to be physically available for a specific number of minutes per week. We’ve just quietly bolted the two together — good and available— until they feel like the same thing.
They’re not.
I’ve seen full-time employees coast for years, present but checked out, doing the bare minimum with maximum visibility. And I’ve seen part-time employees care so much about their work that they think about it in the shower, solve problems on the school run, and deliver more in three focused days than others manage in five distracted ones.
Time in a chair tells you nothing about commitment.
It tells you about availability. And availability isn’t what you actually want. It’s just the thing that’s easy to measure.
The confidence tax nobody talks about
Here’s where this stops being an abstract argument about productivity and starts costing real people, real opportunities.
When you’ve internalised the message that part-time means less-than – and after a while, most women do – something quietly corrosive happens to your confidence.
You stop putting yourself forward.
You see the senior role and think, they’ll never do that part-time, no point asking. You downplay what you’ve achieved because it happened in four days instead of five, as though the output needs an asterisk. You apologise – actually apologise – for leaving at pick-up time, while a colleague heads off for a “client lunch” that’s really a haircut, and nobody bats an eyelid.
You start to shrink yourself to fit the box you’ve been told you belong in.
And this is the bit that makes me want to shout from the rooftops: the confidence dip isn’t a reflection of your ability. It’s a reflection of how you’ve been treated.
If you’re repeatedly passed over, quietly sidelined, and made to feel that your hours make you a lesser bet, of course, your confidence takes a hit. That’s not a personal failing. That’s a completely rational response to being undervalued.
(It’s the same confidence knock so many women describe after a career break – the sense that stepping outside the traditional full-time mould has somehow disqualified you. It hasn’t. But the feeling is real, and it’s worth naming.)
The tragedy is what happens next. Brilliant women talk themselves out of roles they’d walk. They accept less — less seniority, less pay, less challenge — because they’ve absorbed the idea that wanting flexibility means lowering their expectations everywhere else.
It doesn’t.
Wanting to work in a way that fits your life is not a downgrade of your ambition. It’s just a refusal to set your life on fire to prove a point about hours.
For the employers reading this
And some of you are. Good. This part’s for you.
You’ve told me repeatedly, at events, in meetings, over email, that you “can’t find the talent.” That hiring is hard. That good people are thin on the ground.
Let me gently suggest something.
The talent isn’t missing. You’ve filtered it out.
Every time a role goes out as full-time-only when it doesn’t need to be, you remove a huge pool of experienced, capable, motivated people before they ever see the ad. The returning professional with fifteen years’ experience. The senior manager who needs school hours. The person who’d stay loyal for a decade if you just trusted them to manage their own time.
Gone. Not because they weren’t brilliant. Because your default setting quietly showed them the door.
And here’s what makes it worse — the people you are filtering out are, on the evidence, some of the most productive, focused and loyal hires you’ll ever make. They don’t waste time, because they don’t have time to waste. They’re grateful for an employer who backed them, and gratitude, it turns out, is a powerful thing – it comes back to you as effort, loyalty, and people who go above and beyond because someone finally said yes.
The companies figuring this out aren’t being generous. They’re not doing charity. They’re hiring exceptional people, their competitors are too short-sighted to see — and getting them at a moment when loyalty is cheap to earn and hard to lose.
So the next time you’re about to write “full-time only” on a job spec, stop and ask yourself one honest question:
Do I actually need this person for five days?
Or have I just never questioned why the number was five in the first place?
What good actually looks like
We’ve spent so long measuring the wrong thing that we’ve forgotten what we were trying to measure in the first place.
Good work is not hours logged. It’s not visible busyness. It’s not who’s still at their desk at 6 pm or who answers Slack at 9 on a Sunday.
Good work is the work. Done well. By someone who cares.
If a person delivers that in three focused days, they haven’t given you less. They’ve given you exactly what you asked for, without the padding – and freed up two days of their own life in the bargain. That’s not a compromise you’re generously tolerating. That’s a better deal for everyone if you’d only see it that way.
The future of work won’t be won by companies that squeeze the most hours out of people. It’ll be won by the ones that get the most value from people – and understand that those are not the same thing.
Part-time isn’t the discount option.
Done right, it’s the smart one.
The bottom line
Part-time doesn’t mean less committed.
It often means more focused, more efficient, and more fiercely protective of the time it does have — because that time is finite and everybody in the room knows it.
If you’re a woman who’s been made to feel like your hours make you a lesser bet: they don’t. Your value was never measured in minutes at a desk, whatever you’ve been led to believe. Ask for the role. Name what you’ve achieved. Refuse to apologise for working in a way that fits your actual life.
And if you’re an employer still defaulting to full-time because that’s just how it’s always been done: you’re not protecting quality. You’re quietly turning away some of the best people you’ll never get to meet.
Commitment was never about hours.
It’s about time we stopped pretending it was.
At Investing in Women, we connect brilliant women with flexible, part-time and remote roles at employers who actually get it — and help those employers hire the talent their competitors keep overlooking. If you’re looking for a role that fits your life, browse our jobs board. And if you’re an employer ready to stop measuring the wrong thing, let’s talk.