Ten past eleven on a weekday night, and the big city office blocks are not empty. Support agents are fielding software trouble calls, editors are cutting tomorrow’s broadcast, and logistics coordinators are monitoring endless shipping movements. Such employment is generally better paid than their daytime counterparts, and is overrepresented by males. It’s not so much about the ability or the drive as it is about what happens once the shift ends and work starts on the way home.
The Dark’s Premium Companion
There has been a long-standing wage premium for night and evening work. The added cost to employers of hiring workers for hours they don’t want to work comes in a variety of forms: shift differentials, overtime rates and quicker promotion of workers willing to work unpopular hours. For software support, 24/7 service means someone has to be working at 2 a.m. Junior staff are usually called into action in the final editing process and overnight productions in media production. In corporate logistics, time zone coordination is one of the most hectic parts of the day, especially during the late hours.
These positions can be a quick way for a young professional to get started. Working a few years at night can mean a better salary, a promotion to a supervisory role, or experience that can help them find a better day job later on. Anyone who can’t deal with these changes is locked out of the shortcut, and it turns out that the barrier isn’t smoothed out evenly.
The Journey Nobody Counts
Employers typically consider a shift to be over at the time of an employee’s logoff. The most dangerous time of day for many women is from 7 a.m. to midnight. After 10 or 11 at night, public transport becomes less frequent, longer, and stations are different. The phenomenon that women change their travel behaviour more than men has been observed by researchers for years in the field of urban safety. Urban safety researchers have long indicated that women change their travel behaviour to a greater degree than men, for example, avoiding some routes, travelling with other people when possible, and rejecting trips that might involve walking alone in the dark.
When planners and community groups conduct a transit safety audit—in which they walk a route and document lighting, visibility and other factors—the same issues are found in each city. Dark, lonely platforms, long gaps in services and low numbers of staff on platforms. None of these is dramatic alone. They add up to a journey around which a woman must plan, one that a man in her line of work might not think about.
The options are not straightforward, either. For many women, ride-hailing or taxis may seem safer, but the expense of a late-night ride can eat up much of that premium that came with the change. The woman who is buying her way home safely after her night shift is being taxed for the privilege of working those hours, and it’s a harder blow for those who earn entry-level wages.
What Women Describe
The quiet calculation of women who work at night: They speak the language of logistics: which stop is the brightest, which friend lives on the same bus line, if a fellow works at the same stop, can they wait for the bus. A support agent may say that she took the job because a fellow employee lived nearby and they could go together, and she would not have taken the job otherwise. Another may explain why she’s getting off the bus early on some nights to try to catch the last reliable ride, which she notes costs her hours and visibility with her managers.
Some say the reverse. They considered the change schedule, the trip home and decided to take the day role, even if they were paid less. It is rare for these options to appear in any statistic. NONE of the people record a job that they did not apply for, or a promotion that they did not try for because it involved a “safely unreachable” shift.
How Small Choices Become a Wage Gap
From a gender-economics standpoint, it is a tale of how constraints become outcomes. When women systematically avoid certain jobs, such as night jobs, due to transport risks, they also forgo the premium pay associated with those jobs. The impact accumulates over a lifetime. If the shift differential isn’t taken, the base salary is lower, resulting in lower raises and lower pension contributions. But the experience gained from the night shift is exactly what managers value, for example, handling crisis situations with minimal oversight.
This is sometimes referred to as a compensating differential issue. Rewarding workers for working at night is more costly for them, and they are paid more for doing so. However, the price is not the same for everyone. So the same pay is worth less to women when the hidden costs of commuting are higher. Then the market can create a gender gap that no employer had planned for, and no one discriminates against an employer.
It also clears the way from the more common discussion on choice. It would be easy to say that women just prefer to work during the day. However, a preference developed under a safety constraint is not a freely developed preference. The pattern of who does night work would be very different if it were as safe and as inexpensive.
What Employers and Cities Can Do
A few companies have started to make the trip to work part of their duty. There are several common themes in workplace transport policies. Employers can offer or subsidise transportation to and from work at night, arrange shuttle buses on regular routes, or ensure a safe waiting area until transportation arrives. Some have flexible start and end times to allow staff to avoid the quietest times of the day. Others provide rides for all night-shift employees, so there is no singling out of women and no labelling of the policy.
Cities also have a part to play. Improvements to lighting at stops, increased late-night operations, staff visible at stations, and advanced information about travel times ease the workload for individual staff members. Improvements targeted at women are likely to benefit everyone who travels late, given women’s higher likelihood of changing their behaviour for safety reasons.
It’s not a matter of free will. Employer-provided transport will be at the employer’s expense, and micro businesses may find it difficult to cover the costs. Public investments in night service compete for funds with other budget items and are often based on low ridership, which is due in large part to the service being unsafe or infrequent. One of the tougher problems to crack is this circular logic: any poor service diminishes demand, and low demand justifies poor service.
Conclusion
The night-shift transit penalty is very easy to miss, as it occurs between the office door and the front door. But it shapes access to some of the higher-paying, faster-advancing careers in modern cities. The opportunity to take a night shift is not the same for all who may be suited to it, and where it is not safe or affordable to get home after a night shift, it is not equally available.
It will take more than just encouraging women to apply to close the gap. It takes a comprehensive approach to safe transport as an integral part of the job, a joint responsibility between the employer and city planners. Until then, many women will continue to do the same silent calculation each day at its end, and the price of that calculation will continue to be paid for year after year in their wages.