Working Life Barometer in the Baltic Countries 2002 (pdf) - mol.fi

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Weekly working hours in Lithuania by gender 2002
Men Women All
Less than 30h 6.3 % 10.6 % 8.5 %
30-40h 50.6 % 54.1 % 52.3 %
41h or more 43.1 % 35.4 % 39.2 %
Total
100 %
(N=441)
100 %
(N=444)
100 %
(N=885)
The increasingly common occurrence of long working weeks has lengthened
the average weekly working hours also. The trend has been reinforced by corresponding
changes in the number of short working weeks - that is, fewer than
before do part-time work. For men, the average number of hours worked per
week was 43.9; and for women, 41.7 hours. In 1998, the corresponding figures
were 42.4 and 39.3 respectively, so both men's and women's average working
hours have lengthened.
In Lithuania, as in Latvia, those working in the private and in the public sector
have very different working weeks. It is noticeable that the lengthening in
Lithuania's working weeks is due to longer weekly hours for private sector
employees. Wage earners in the public sector do a working week that is practically
the same length as three years earlier. The average weekly hours
worked by the men in the public sector were still very close to the traditional
40-hour week - that is, 40.8 hours. The men in the private sector worked 45.4
hours a week on average. The difference between the sectors was thus 4.6
hours. During the three-year period, the working week of men in the private
sector has lengthened by about 1-1.5 hours.
The real news, however, comes to light in the corresponding figures for the
women. Women in the private sector did an average working week of as many
as 46.8 hours, which is greater than the corresponding figure for men in
Lithuania and greater than for any other women's group under comparison in
the Baltic countries! The difference compared with the public-sector women is
in fact astonishingly great. The women working in the public sector worked an
average of 37.3 hours per week - as many as 9.5 hours less than those in the
private sector! For the women in the public sector, there have been practically
no changes in working week length, but in the private sector the changes have