Flextime as a determinant of sickness absence: A men to women and juniors to seniors comparison

The goal of this study is to analyze the previously unexplored gender and age specific relationship of flextime with absenteeism. This work is based on a French national survey on work organization and working conditions carried out on 25 000 employees. The approach taken is a quantitative analysis with a multinomial logit model. Contrary to the previous results, as we control the confounding effect of work organization and working conditions, flexible schedule is not significantly associated with job satisfaction and health, except for juniors for whom flexible schedule without core times is positively related to job satisfaction. The main contribution of our study is to relativize the effectiveness of flextime in decreasing absenteeism of women. Our research suggests that actions on work organization and working conditions are more effective to reduce women's absenteeism.