Newsweek ran a troubling and contradictory article last week, entitled “Stuck In Place: The Myth of Women’s Equality in Europe.” (Thanks Jeremy.)
In the US, when a woman has a baby, she is entitled to 3 months unpaid leave. If she wants her job waiting for her, she has to find a sitter, pop on those nipple pads, and pump in the bathroom. Some European countries offer as much as three years paid leave. They have state sponsored daycare. Part time work is plentiful.
Which is better, Newsweek asks.
Well, Newsweek tells me that the European model isn’t that great, because all those generous child leave policies mean that women take too much time off and never put in the time needed to get to the top of the career ladder. They end up with jobs, not careers. The representation of women in the top positions of business and politics is far lower than the U.S.
Newsweek didn’t prove to me that child leave policies are solely responsible for the lower numbers of women in positions of power. Europeans may have more traditional ideas about women; it’s possible for sexism to exist in economically liberal countries. (Later in the article, they sort of come around to that point.)
The goal of child-leave policies is to give parents options and balance. If parents wish to take time off, they can. If they want to return earlier and put in the hours necessary to reach the top of their profession, they can. You have to evaluate work-family programs based on how much flexibility it gives families and how content they are; these programs shouldn’t be evaluated based on how they enable women to achieve power. Most propopents of work-family balance recognize that balance might mean not making senior partner.
How women with kids can get ahead is a whole different topic, but one of the best ways is to have a stay at home dad.
The Newsweek article also goes on to say that Europe isn’t generous enough. There’s not enough childcare in Germany. The tax programs discourage second incomes. The workplace is excessively rigid and doesn’t offer enough flextime. What the hell is their point?
In bizarro world, the article proceeds to lecture European countries that they should do more to help working families. No inner thoughts about what we could learn from their example.
All things considered, I would rather be in Paris.
I know that Elizabeth has written about the Newsweek article, too. I didn’t peek at her post, yet. Let’s see if we got the same answer….
Apt. 11d 
The idea that European workplace laws are holding women back comports with what else we know about European labour markets: the more protected a group is, the harder it is for that group to find a job.
In Sweden, for example, something like 80% of women work for the state, 20% for private firms; the percentages are reversed for men. Why? Private firms can’t afford to have an executive who takes two years or so off for each kid. It’s hardly surprising that they do everything they can to discourage women from coming to work for them. If it were me, and I were a private employer, adn I knew that any woman I hired or groomed for a management position would end up taking two or four or six years off at inconvenient times, while I was forced to hold her job open . . . I think I’d be looking for reasons not to hire or promote her.
There are other issues . . . Germany’s completely $!%# insane retail laws, which basically make it impossible to have two working spouses unless you like eating whatever you can buy at a train station convenience store, is based on a rather quaint conception of the family. Switzerland’s ideas are even more extreme, from what I understand. But the fact that we see this distribution in France and the Scandinavian countries, which are broadly recognized as the most egalitarian in Europe, suggests that the problem is not just, or even mostly, sexism.
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As Jane notes, the Scandinavian countries have a sort of mummy track, in which the public sector has expanded to meet the employment and scheduling needs of working mothers in full employment societies. (And the Nordic societies are full employment, based on a worker-citizen model. In Sweden, eg, the unemployment rate for women is something like 2.5%, about the same for men.) This certainly has its drawbacks, but it should be noted that it has wonderful effects as far as reducing child poverty, particularly in single mother households. For example, while the US poverty rates in the late-90s were around 17% for two-parent families and 59% for lone-parent families (this latter figure will have dropped by a few percentage points by now, I think), for Sweden they were 3.6% for two-parent families and 4.5% for lone-parent families. Thanks largely to their female employment policies, the Scandinavian countries have done a remarkably successful job at reducing poverty in general, and female poverty in particular.
But of course by ungendering poverty, they have to a fairly significant degree gendered the work paths available to women and men, and this does present some very real issues concerning ambition. However, my understanding is that there is some movement towards reducing the gender specificity of public v private work streams – not by cutting benefits for women, but by increasing the mandatory benefits for fathers. Basically, the idea is that any successful system must start with excellent child development, and this demands lots of parental leave. The next step will then be to make parental leave more equal in its gender distribution – ie men will take more – so that women aren’t seen as less viable employees.
I’m sure that most Americans will believe this won’t work, but I think that most Americans would have believed that the Nordic model as currently constructed couldn’t possibly work as well as it does.
As for Germany, well, what can you say? They’re still clinging to the old single-breadwinner model. Sigh…
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I wrote my above comments before reading the piece, and now that I’ve read it I’d like to say that the journalism is somewhat shoddy, in the sense that issues are being cherry-picked from the country where they are the worst. For instance, it talks about how many women in Europe are in part-time work, and then notes that a study shows that in the UK, part-time work is particularly poorly paid. But the particularly poor pay for part-time work is a problem specific to the UK and a few other neoliberal countries, not one that is a major issue in the social democratic nations of Scandinavia, which have consciously sought to address it (at least in part through the very same policies that have led to mummy tracking in the public sector). And Germany is an outlier in a great many areas – as I noted above, it still runs a single breadwinner policy model, so using it to critique Europe as a whole is at best faintly absurd – no more sensible than writing an article on North American universal, state-funded healthcare. (Oh, that only exists in Canada? It’s not a North America-wide phenomenon? Who knew?!) Italy, too, is an outlier, notable for its incredible lack of support for working women; its policies are tilted strongly towards keep mothers out of work, rather than in it. And guess which country has the lowest birth rate in Europe? Italy, because women want to work, so delay childbirth.
While there are very real issues in all European countries, the notion that “the European model” is failing is something that could only be sold to people who view Europe as a basically homogenous continent. There is absolutely no such thing as a European model for gender equity, work-life balance, childcare, etc. The countries over here have widely divergent policies, and to pretend otherwise is to be more than a little facetious.
One other thing, on a more personal level: here’s how it works at my partner’s (UK) company. Women receive excellent (by American standards) family benefits, with good maternity leave and the ability to go part-time after having a child, should they want to. My partner is at low-senior level, just as high as she can get without having to bump her current 40 hour/week workload up to 60 per week, but high enough to have a fairly strong degree of autonomy and power, coupled with pretty damn nice pay. At her giant company, this level of low-senior management is populated at least 3-1 by women, with very few females moving up to the high-senior level. Why? Because those who do take the next step up find that their job is no longer compatible with being a good parent, either as a mother or a father. (The men who are in this role rarely see their children awake.) So most women at her company decide to cutrail their ambitions to reach the very top, in favour of getting pretty high up the ladder, but also being able to spend time with their children. I should note that none of these women then suddenly turn around and say “I don’t have a career, I only have a job.” They still have a career; just not one as high-flying, yet which allows them to spend more time with their children and partners. It’s a compromise, for better or worse – probably a bit of both, really, but then that’s what compromises are. I won’t try to extrapolate from this example; I just wanted to throw a real-life case study into the mix.
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Thanks, guys. Great comments. You both have more details about European practices than I do.
Reuben, your partner sounds like she works for a great company. I am very jealous.
The mummy track in Europe may be flawed, but at least it exists. In the US, women are forced into all or nothing tracks. Extended maternity leave is expensive, but offering part time work options isn’t. Probably even saves companies money. Why aren’t these opportunities offered here?
The new push to have men take more advantage of child care benefits is fascinating. We’re leap years away from that here.
Work-family programs probably do take a toll on gender equality. It could be remedied by having more men take advantage of the programs and by having better ramps up to more ambitious work, but still it is a problem. I guess we have to decide what is more important.
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Israel has something in between the U.S. and Europe. Women get three months paid leave — after the birth, but you can start the clock ticking earlier if you want to take off your last few weeks of pregnancy — and then can take up to another nine months off unpaid and are guaranteed their job back.
It works pretty well, I think. The ambitious types go back after their three months, which are stress-free, because they are paid. Those that want more time off take it, but the fact that it’s not paid doesn’t give you the feeling that you are being an idiot taking more paid time off when the state is offering to you on a silver platter.
Interestingly, a few years ago, they decided to offer the three months paid time off to mothers OR fathers — but almost zero fathers wanted the leave, even in households where the woman earned more….
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My immediate thought upon scanning the Newsweek article and other bloggers on the topic is the complete focus on elite, educated folk who even think about work as a “career” and that the issue of which system is more likely to result in women living in poverty. So, I’m glad to see what Reuben had to write.
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Learner,
I think you make a good point (but then I would, wouldn’t I?), and I think it’s important to ask ourselves who we are making our policies for. In Germany, they’re making family policy for a nation that no longer exists. In Italy, pretty much teh same thing. In the US, the system is geared towards fairness for the super-ambitious. And in Scandinavia, it’s geared toward people who want to have decent careers (not just jobs, as Newsweek says) and an excellent family life – ie the vast majority of the population.
I take Jane’s point about the ambition-quelling negatives of the Scandinavian system, but would argue a couple of points against her position. One is that the vast majority of us lack the talent and ambition to make it to the very top of the corporate ladder, so how useful to us are policies that focus on that while actually making it harder to achieve the balanced life we want? Even many if not most of those who do have the talent lack the willingness to do 60-70 hour weeks required to climb to the very top. It would make Ayn Rand weep to hear it, but most of us, even the ambitious (and I count myself among that group), really would readily choose a good career and a very fulfilling family life over a very good career and an greatly compromised family life.
That being said, once a country has policies in place that largely allow both men and women to have good careers and good family lives, then it might be time to start tweaking things so that ambition isn’t quashed. But much better to do as the Nordic countries have done and put in policies that work for the bottom ninety or ninety-five percent first, rather than focus on policies that only really work for the top five percent, who, after all, have loads of non-governmental resources at their disposal anyway.
Re ambition and public service, while the gendered nature of Scandinavian work streams is something to try to fix, it is fair to point out that just because a woman is working in the public sector doesn’t mean she has to quell her ambitions. I work in teh charity sector in the UK, and my last two Chief Executives have been female, as have most of the directors I’ve worked under. These have all been bright, ambitious, powerful and highly respected women – and once they reach the very top (eg Chief Executive of a major charity) they do put in long hours. But one of the reasons they’ve been able to climb is because on the way up, when they were in their childbearing years, they were able to work family-friendly hours, and were able to take long maternity leaves, and weren’t diverted into cul-de-sacs for it. This happens in other non-private sectors as well.
So while I agree that public/private work streams should not be so gendered, and that this is something for policy to tackle, I know from first-hand experience that ambition and career progress and rising to the top aren’t things that only happen in private industry. And more importantly, I know that policies should first try to serve the vast majority before they seek to solve the problems of a relatively small, headline-grabbing minority.
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Yay. Fantastic, reuben.
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[Blush]
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The Scandinavian model is far from perfect. For one you have a homogenious population who all (pretty much) have a common cultural norm of hard work and trust of the state. The same cannot be said for the US. There is a lot of distrust of the state, and I for one, would not trust the state to raise my child in state run day care.
Perhaps our idea of what is sucessful and what is powerful for a woman is based on what men think is successful and powerful. Perhaps we need a new parasdigm altogether.
Just thinking…
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