Why do employers offer flexible jobs? To help workers find work-life balance or to shift cost & risk?

Maria Balgova Matthias Qian & I take a machine learning approach to analyze the text of 46million UK job ads to provide some answers. 1/n

Measuring flexible jobs is HARD & prone to under-recording, e.g. ZHC controversy in 2013/14

We use a supervised machine learning approach: manually annotate 7,000 vacancies to train classification model. We achieve high accuracy & improve over keyword search 2/n

Job flexibility is more likely to be described in low-wage ads, in care, services & 'elementary' occupations 3/n