📝 Full paper: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
📂 Meeting hours dataset: www.maxemilking.com/data
10/10

Late working hours are often seen as a barrier to gender equity in politics and beyond🧱.

My findings need not imply that family-friendly scheduling is bad policy, but if early meetings backfire for working-class politicians, that trade-off needs to be part of the conversation. 9/10

Early sessions, however, increase absences among politicians with inflexible private-sector day jobs by 6 percentage points (~27% relative to their mean).

These jobs are typically in the low-skilled/service sector. 8/10

Results: Neither women in general (Panel A), nor women with children (Panel B), are more likely to attend meetings held at family-friendly hours.

I discuss possible reasons for this null result in the paper.🤔7/10

Importantly, this timing variation is conditionally balanced with respect to the topics discussed (black circles in the figure), suggesting it is unrelated to individual preferences for attending. 6/10

I exploit within-council variation in session timing – such as in Sør-Aurdal municipality – to assess who is less likely to be absent when meetings are held early (~11am 🌞) vs. late (~5pm 🌙). 5/10

Norway provides a compelling setting: recent years have seen growing debate over council meeting times, especially calls for more daytime sessions. 4/10

I study a 25% random sample of Norwegian municipalities, hand-coding individual-level attendance for all 2,620 politicians across 3,334 local council meetings (2015–2019).

Attendance is generally high, but each session sees 10–15% absence due to illness, childcare, urgent work, etc. 3/10

Instead, holding meetings at earlier, more family-friendly times reduces participation among politicians with inflexible, often low-skilled day jobs⚠️.

This challenges the idea that scheduling reforms are a silver bullet for inclusion. 2/10

📝 Full paper: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
📂 Meeting hours dataset: www.maxemilking.com/data
10/10

Late working hours are often seen as a barrier to gender equity in politics and beyond.🕔

My findings need not imply that family-friendly scheduling is bad policy, but if early meetings backfire for working-class politicians, that trade-off needs to be part of the conversation. 9/10

Instead, politicians with inflexible private-sector day jobs are negatively affected by early meetings: their absence increases by 6 percentage points (~27% relative to their mean).

These jobs are typically in the low-skilled/service sector. 8/10

Results: Neither women in general (Panel A), nor women with children (Panel B), are more likely to attend meetings held at family-friendly hours.

I discuss possible reasons for this null result in the paper. 7/10

Importantly, this variation is conditionally balanced with respect to the topics discussed in the meetings (see black circles in the figure), suggesting it is unrelated to individual preferences for attending. 6/10

I exploit within-council variation in session timing – such as in Sør-Aurdal municipality – to assess who are less likely to be absent when meetings are held early (~11am 🌞) vs. late (~5pm 🌙). 5/10

Norway provides a compelling setting: in recent years, local media have featured growing debate around council meeting times, especially calls for more daytime sessions. 4/10

I study a 25% random sample of Norwegian municipalities, hand-coding individual-level attendance for all 2,620 politicians across 3,334 local council meetings (2015 – 2019).

Attendance is generally high, but each session sees 10–15% absence due to illness, childcare, urgent work, or similar. 3/10

Instead, holding meetings at earlier, more family-friendly hours reduces participation among politicians with inflexible daytime commitments.

This challenges the idea that scheduling reforms are a silver bullet for inclusion. 2/10

10/ Please help share our extended replication to correct the record on this misleading policy evaluation!

Full replication text here: www.econstor.eu/handle/10419...