Over the recent years part-time employment has risen in many European economies, contributing strongly to the overall job growth. This trend has evoked a strong debate on the role of part-time employment for the flexibility of the labour market and work and family reconciliation, but also on the quality of part-time jobs. Nevertheless, an upward trend in parttime development has so far omitted Central and Eastern European countries, in spite of a severe conflict between work and family that has been arising in this part of Europe over the last 15 years. The focus of this paper is on Poland with an objective to investigate the role of part-time employment in this country over the 1990s. For this purpose a set of binary logit models for the years 1993, 1997 and 2002 with the dependant variables defined as part-time versus full-time employment and part-time employment versus non-employment were estimated. In a second step, a k-means cluster analysis on a 2002 working population was implemented. The results clearly show that part-time employment was hardly used for work and family reconciliation, but was rather taken involuntarily by the low-skilled facing lower opportunities for a highly paid full-time job on a permanent basis. The latter refers mainly to women.