8 ms·

Dutch Women work less, have a big gender pay gap, and they love it

105 points by db42 16y ago

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
scotth 16y ago
I just felt a little jealous. They have the kind of freedom I would someday like to have. Maybe Dutch men should be fighting to work less.
- ojilles 16y ago
  Being dutch myself, I would say the effect is even stronger in the Nordic countries.
  - happyhappy 16y ago
    Being Nordic, I have no idea what you are talking about.
    - Muzza 16y ago
      Yeah, me neither. While I can't speak for all Nordic countries, the development in Sweden seems to be the exact OPPOSITE of what's going on in the Netherlands. Sheet, the lefties were even calling for a law requiring employers to provide full-time employment for all part-timers who desired it (a crazy stupid idea lacking any regard for basic economics, but hey...).
- wasigh 16y ago
  Being a Dutch man I already work less :). Ontopic: I find the conclusion strange. 20 years ago a lot of women didn't work. Right now the percentage of working women is quite high. Some people will say it's because of our country getting more US like. I like my work, but still if I don't have to be there 40+hours a week and make a decent living. You're not going to find me at the office.
- lionhearted 16y ago
  > I just felt a little jealous. They have the kind of freedom I would someday like to have. Maybe Dutch men should be fighting to work less. I wouldn't be too jealous. There's some fantastically amazing things about Dutch society, but it has its share of problems... a huge rift opened in Dutch culture after WWII, for a few reasons. The country was largely savaged by the Nazis, but also a sizable minority of Dutch people collaborated with the Nazis. It shook the country pretty hard - to this day, "collaborator" has massively insulting connotations in Dutch. The kind of thing you might get into a fistfight over. I don't know the earlier history so well, but it seems like since WWII, Dutch culture has become more clique-oriented, where you have your close friends from a very young age, but casual acquaintances keep each other at arms length much moreso, and it's a bit less trusting of a society than others. I think it's better when you get out of the big cities, though, semi-rural areas of the Netherlands are beautiful and the people seem a lot friendlier and happier. I don't know, maybe one of the Dutch residents can add on or correct me, but the social relationships in the Netherlands seemed strained. From my limited study of the history, this definitely wasn't the case from between the Dutch Golden Age until WWII. It seems like a lot of Dutch social institutions are built around the fact that neighborly associations and quickly-built friendly acquaintanceships don't really happen as much in the Netherlands. I love the country, but it's not somewhere I'd want to live, especially as an outsider. Anyway, this is second hand, I only spent a few months there over the course of my life. It's based on what I've heard from local people and a couple expats who moved there, one who loves the country but points these things out. Maybe someone Dutch could weigh in and say whether this is on the mark or the off the mark... it seems like a lot of the social institutions and customs evolved to compensate for some problems that were never fully rooted out after the war and decolonialization.
  - danieldk 16y ago
    I don't know, maybe one of the Dutch residents can add on or correct me, but the social relationships in the Netherlands seemed strained. Sorry, but I have to say you are off the mark. I usually find that the Dutch society is generally very open, and nearly any topic is fair game (watch Dutch TV for fun). This goes hand in hand with strong individualism, which means that the Dutch generally do not have tight bonds. To outsiders this may seem cold and maybe snobbish/arrogant.
- geebee 16y ago
  I had the same reaction. According to the article, Dutch women pity the people (mainly men, it seems) who work the longer hours that enable the (presumably) higher standard of living than a part time work schedule would allow. Of course, none of this is a problem if everyone is living the way they want to live. Some people are really passionate about work, and you can still have a decent work-family-life balance with a full time job - especially if your income is good and you can support a spouse who provides a lot of domestic support. But it would be interesting to hear from the other corner of the room some time. The title of this article is "Dutch Women work less, have a big gender pay gap, and they love it". How about the headline "Dutch men work more, have a big gender pay gap, and they <love? hate? feel ambivalence about?> it"
vegasbrianc 16y ago
That is also why the taxes are 52%. They have to nail everyone else who does work full time and earns a decent wage.
- mpk 16y ago
  Thanks for misrepresenting that. 52% is the highest tax bracket which most people won't hit. The brackets are 2.35%, 10.85%, 42% and 52%. The first two brackets also contain the Social Security payments - which the part-time workers definitely hit. (Edit for completeness : effectively the tax brackets end up as 33, 41, 42, 52).
- danieldk 16y ago
  The 52% rate only applies to the highest bracker of income (above € 54.776). Taxes on other brackets are far lower. The relative high tax rates also buy you good insurance, a government-sanctioned pension, coverage of some costs of studying, etc. Or in other words, taxes are relatively high because it is a welfare state.
  - poundy 16y ago
    That's about $75,000. I am sure a lot of people pay that. Its nice to see that it also buys you better insurance, pretty good. That's the way it should be! In the UK all you get is the same kind of health care irrespective of your contribution.
    - zephyrfalcon 16y ago
      I think he means that the existence of high tax rates buys everyone good insurance, etc. I haven't heard of people in higher tax brackets getting better health insurance than those in lower ones. So it would be the same as in the UK. Then again, I left the Netherlands nine years ago, so who knows, maybe it has changed since then... =/
      - wil2k 16y ago
        You're correct zephyrfalcon. People get the same kind of health care, no matter if they earn a lot or not much compared to others.
RyanMcGreal 16y ago
Single page: http://www.slate.com/id/2274736/pagenum/all/ http://www.slate.com/id/2274736/pagenum/all/
danieldk 16y ago
To someone living in the Netherlands, feminism seems to be turned on its head here. After much pressure to increase participation, lots of women simply argue for their right to raise kids. So, they usually prefer working part-time and using other time as 'social time'. Now, if only us men demanded the same ;).
- marquis 16y ago
  Thanks for your reasonable comments on the topic. As a hard-working, caring female I was offended by the tone of this article. By the first paragraph she was making assumptions and generalisations, and I couldn't take the rest of the article seriously with her attempt to make the statistics fit. I'm familiar with Dutch culture fairly well and it has many complex reasons for it's social structures that I don't think should be glibly lacerated to fit a concept. I've always found the Netherlands a highly liberal, equal and exciting country to work in, whether you want to push yourself over long hours or go home at 5pm on the dot.
- baguasquirrel 16y ago
  FWIW, one of the more common complaints amongst the hackers I've hung out with is that they've wanted to work part-time so they can spend more time on hobby projects. Do kids count as hobby projects?
jeroen 16y ago
Is "less than 10 percent of women here are employed full-time" really that interesting? My sister works 32 hours a week, yet earns more than her husband. Sure, technically she doesn't work full-time, but I see no classical gender wars scenario here. My wife recently stopped working. I love my work, she started to resent hers and would rather spend her time on other things. I earn enough for both of us and with her now doing more of the housekeeping I have more free time as well. We're both happier this way, so where's the problem?
- erikpukinskis 16y ago
  There's no problem with your wife choosing not to work. The problem is when people attribute women's participation rates solely to "choice" and other benign phenomena. Some women very much want to work like hell and kick ass at work, and there are real barriers for them that we all need to continue working on taking down. In other words, the problem is if you stop caring about women's representation in your business, because you assume all women are like your wife. Not that I have any reason to think that's what you're doing. I'm just answering your question. :)
  - jeroen 16y ago
    I agree, but I don't think the 10% number adds anything useful to that. I just wanted to show that not all of the other 90% of Dutch women are struggling to find employment or wishing they could work more hours.
- btmorex 16y ago
  Well, one problem is: "In 2000, a law was passed mandating that women have the right to cut back hours at their jobs without repercussions from employers." If the article's correct, that seems like it discriminates against men. If cutting back working hours is an important right, then why can't men do the same without repercussions?
  - ben0x539 16y ago
    Because typically workplaces are already biased towards men and employers do not need more incentives not to disadvantage male employees, I suspect.
Female 16y ago
Apparently I'm Dutch! I only work 10 hours a week. And it's really awesome. My mother is really annoyed that she helped pay for my Ivy education, and is bugging for me to get a full time job. She jokes that I got my "Mrs." But other than that I love it.
dan00 16y ago
You never should have the right to feel right if you aren't getting ahead! ;) Strange, society tells us the way to go to feel right, but if we follow, nothing feels right.
maxklein 16y ago
It's difficult to be an ambitious person and also be very gentle and caring. One requires focus on the needs of other people, the other require focusing on your own needs and riding over people. Gender roles and families allow the existence of both emotional states within one entity - it is possible for a family to be made up of both a very human side and a very aggressive side. This maximises the success potential of a family unit - one half can be ambitiously working towards acquiring more, while the other can be ambitiously working towards building closer family ties and emotional support. When both parts of the family are aggressively working towards acquiring more, the softness of a family gets lost. There is less emotional dependence, less of one person doing one thing, and more of two people who have a lot of potential to be at loggerheads with one another. Raising a family and acquiring a lot of money require completely different emotional outlooks, and I believe that there are not many people who can make the switch from roughriding for money to being tender at home. Families need two different people fulfilling different roles to be successful. That's the evolutionary method, that's the method that is culturally agnostic and that has taken us as humans this far. Intellectually trying to force a different system to exist is causing unhappy societies and break-ups of family units that used to be happy. When couples say the other half completes them, they mean that the other person fills in some parts that they lack, they don't mean that the other is exactly the same as they are.
- kurtosis 16y ago
  why not take the simpler explanation that the reason families have broken up is that they actually weren't that happy? Also why doesn't having multiple people in a family earning an income lead to an increase in security? i.e. the impact of a (e.g. job loss, illness) can be buffered by the other partner's income.
  - billswift 16y ago
    Only if they weren't already spending up to the limit (and past) of both incomes together. If one is working and loses his job, the other can get a job; if both are working and don't have any cushion, they are more likely to have a problem.
- 16y ago
fauigerzigerk 16y ago
I wonder about the different character of fulltime versus part time jobs. In most countries I know, part time equals boring. Maybe that's a little different in the Netherlands but I doubt that it's massively different, otherwise Dutch boardrooms would be full of part time executives. Since I firmly believe that women are just as eager and capable of taking on intellectual challenges as men are, I do indeed regard it as a problem if so many women do not make full use of their potential. Of course, that doesn't mean working more than 12 hours a day under extremely high pressure is the only or even the best way to use that potential.
- JoachimSchipper 16y ago
  Most jobs in the Netherlands can be done part-time. Yes, executive-level jobs are usually an exception, but you can be e.g. a part-time computer programmer without major issues. That said, full-times do earn more money and promotions.
fakelvis 16y ago
The problem I have with this article is that it is written in such an all-encompassing manner, using statistics that do not lend themselves directly to the conclusions presented (for example see jeroen's comment/thread [1]). Freely admitting that I surround myself with ambitious, passionate people, if I look purely at personal anecdotes, almost every female I know in this country would be horrified to be characterised like this. "Lackadaisical approach to their careers"? Coffee at 2p.m.? Snubbing advancement? There are one or two good comments on this at Yglesias / Think Progress: http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2010/11/dutch-women-and-part-time-work/ http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2010/11/dutch-women-and-pa... Now… if only I could persuade my girlfriend to stay in bed after 5:30 or come home before 20:00. [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1929618 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1929618
cracki 16y ago
"full-time" means spending your whole day earning money, just so you have no strength left to enjoy the "rest" of your day. i find that crazy too.
Samuel_Michon 16y ago
From the article: "less than 10 percent of women [in the Netherlands] are employed full-time." According to the Dutch governmental institution CBS (Statistics Netherlands), 59.7% of all Dutch women work. There are 8.4 million women in the Netherlands. 5 million of those are of working age. 967,000 women work full-time. If you only count women of working age, 20% of those work full-time. But even if you were to include infants, students and pensioners in the total, the percentage of women working full-time would be 12% -- higher than the "less than 10%" stated in the article. This is data that I found in 10 minutes, using CBS StatLine. It worries me that the author got such basic data wrong, data that is readily available. It makes me distrust the rest of the presented information as well. http://statline.cbs.nl/StatWeb/dome/?LA=EN http://statline.cbs.nl/StatWeb/dome/?LA=EN http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistics_Netherlands http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistics_Netherlands
- roel_v 16y ago
  I agree, when you look into it in that detail, but it's safe to say that full-time labor participation by women is low and certainly below 20%. Percentage of mothers who work 35 hours or more is 19 over the last 3 years. Then again, overall full time employment is low. 40 % of all jobs are for 35 hours per week or more. Distribution of them between men and women is probably lopsided but it does take some of the punch out of the 'womens' angle of the article. It's not so much just the women who work part time, it's everybody. This was illustrated by another mistake in the article - it's not just women who have a legal right to a reduction (or increase!) in the amount of hours, but the men, too.
- sjs 16y ago
  I don't think hard numbers were the focus of this post, and 10% vs 12% doesn't really change her point as far as I can see. edit: Even 20% doesn't change her point or personal experiences.
  - JoachimSchipper 16y ago
    Including people who can't work is... suggestive.
afshin 16y ago
Financial independence is the only independence in a patriarchal society. Dutch society is pretty liberal, so it may be the case that financial dependence on men does not impinge upon the sense of freedom and well-being for Dutch women. I wonder if the same would hold true in a more conservative country like the US.
sethg 16y ago
I think this is just one example of the difference between European and American feminism. Feminist movements in the USA, the country where “all men are created equal”, have been most successful where they fought for formal equality between men and women—antidiscrimination laws, getting more women into traditionally male professions, punishing sexual harrassment, and so forth. In Europe, which has a much stronger culture of trade unionism, feminism has been more focused on advancing the interests of women as a class (in the same way that a railroad workers’ union would advance the interest of railroad workers as a class). So Europe leads the US in access to abortion, subsidized child care, quotas for women on political-party lists, and so forth. I’m not sure which of these approaches is better but they do lead to different outcomes.
cafard 16y ago
I'd be interested to know what the economic effect of divorce is in the Netherlands. The 1970s and after may have left a lot of American women thinking that they had to look out for themselves.
jacquesm 16y ago
Being Dutch I think I'm qualified to at least observe that plenty of men here too do not have full time jobs and love it. In fact, a fairly common situation is for both partners to work, but not full time.
- c4urself 16y ago
  I think that's a truer balance; not women doing exactly what men do (work 40 hours a week) but men working less and watching the kids one day a week, and women also working. (In Holland, 'papadag' is an understanding, that is, a day that fathers stay at home and watch the kids)
  - roel_v 16y ago
    On a tangential note, I hate that word and will go out of my way to mock people who actually use it in a feeble attempt to curb its spread, even if I like the concept and will be doing it myself come June. To me it sounds like 'hey look at me, here I am one day a week looking after my kids, screw the 6 other days, I've done my share!'. I mean we don't call the day that the mother stays at home 'mommyday' either, because that would be ridiculous - every day is 'mommyday'. Not to rag on you, just bitching a bit ;)
    - yummyfajitas 16y ago
      Just guessing here, but I suspect you don't call the other day "mommyday" for the same reason you don't call regular days "daddyworkinghardtosupportthefamilyday". The normal state of affairs doesn't need a special term.
cageface 16y ago
I've been in Berlin for the last month and people in general here seem also to be less career-focused than Americans. People live well here but I sometimes miss the charge you sometimes feel in the air in the U.S. and even more in Asia.
smutticus 16y ago
I'm an American who has lived in Holland for 8 years so maybe I can offer some perspective. 1) The NL and the USA are different places with many many differences. As I often find myself telling my American friends "Stop comparing apples and oranges". Or the Dutch version "Stop comparing apples and pears". 2) There is less incentive in NL to work and it's easier to work part-time. I moved here partly because I wanted to take it easy after working my ass off in the USA. I now work part-time and love it. I know if I go back to the USA that would be really difficult. 3) The economic situation here is much easier than the USA. It's simply not as cutthroat and the government takes care of poor who need help. Whether that rubs you the wrong way ideologically is beside the point. It's easier to be poor here and not end up dead. 4) Dutch people definitely get depressed. That bit of the article is complete nonsense and I don't where that idea comes from. There are serious problems with depression in this country that show in suicide rates and alcohol abuse rates. Where are her numbers for this assertion?

105 points by db42 16y ago

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

I just felt a little jealous. They have the kind of freedom I would someday like to have. Maybe Dutch men should be fighting to work less.

ojilles 16y ago
Being dutch myself, I would say the effect is even stronger in the Nordic countries.
- happyhappy 16y ago
  Being Nordic, I have no idea what you are talking about.
  - Muzza 16y ago
    Yeah, me neither. While I can't speak for all Nordic countries, the development in Sweden seems to be the exact OPPOSITE of what's going on in the Netherlands. Sheet, the lefties were even calling for a law requiring employers to provide full-time employment for all part-timers who desired it (a crazy stupid idea lacking any regard for basic economics, but hey...).
wasigh 16y ago
Being a Dutch man I already work less :). Ontopic: I find the conclusion strange. 20 years ago a lot of women didn't work. Right now the percentage of working women is quite high. Some people will say it's because of our country getting more US like. I like my work, but still if I don't have to be there 40+hours a week and make a decent living. You're not going to find me at the office.
lionhearted 16y ago
> I just felt a little jealous. They have the kind of freedom I would someday like to have. Maybe Dutch men should be fighting to work less. I wouldn't be too jealous. There's some fantastically amazing things about Dutch society, but it has its share of problems... a huge rift opened in Dutch culture after WWII, for a few reasons. The country was largely savaged by the Nazis, but also a sizable minority of Dutch people collaborated with the Nazis. It shook the country pretty hard - to this day, "collaborator" has massively insulting connotations in Dutch. The kind of thing you might get into a fistfight over. I don't know the earlier history so well, but it seems like since WWII, Dutch culture has become more clique-oriented, where you have your close friends from a very young age, but casual acquaintances keep each other at arms length much moreso, and it's a bit less trusting of a society than others. I think it's better when you get out of the big cities, though, semi-rural areas of the Netherlands are beautiful and the people seem a lot friendlier and happier. I don't know, maybe one of the Dutch residents can add on or correct me, but the social relationships in the Netherlands seemed strained. From my limited study of the history, this definitely wasn't the case from between the Dutch Golden Age until WWII. It seems like a lot of Dutch social institutions are built around the fact that neighborly associations and quickly-built friendly acquaintanceships don't really happen as much in the Netherlands. I love the country, but it's not somewhere I'd want to live, especially as an outsider. Anyway, this is second hand, I only spent a few months there over the course of my life. It's based on what I've heard from local people and a couple expats who moved there, one who loves the country but points these things out. Maybe someone Dutch could weigh in and say whether this is on the mark or the off the mark... it seems like a lot of the social institutions and customs evolved to compensate for some problems that were never fully rooted out after the war and decolonialization.
- danieldk 16y ago
  I don't know, maybe one of the Dutch residents can add on or correct me, but the social relationships in the Netherlands seemed strained. Sorry, but I have to say you are off the mark. I usually find that the Dutch society is generally very open, and nearly any topic is fair game (watch Dutch TV for fun). This goes hand in hand with strong individualism, which means that the Dutch generally do not have tight bonds. To outsiders this may seem cold and maybe snobbish/arrogant.
geebee 16y ago
I had the same reaction. According to the article, Dutch women pity the people (mainly men, it seems) who work the longer hours that enable the (presumably) higher standard of living than a part time work schedule would allow. Of course, none of this is a problem if everyone is living the way they want to live. Some people are really passionate about work, and you can still have a decent work-family-life balance with a full time job - especially if your income is good and you can support a spouse who provides a lot of domestic support. But it would be interesting to hear from the other corner of the room some time. The title of this article is "Dutch Women work less, have a big gender pay gap, and they love it". How about the headline "Dutch men work more, have a big gender pay gap, and they <love? hate? feel ambivalence about?> it"

vegasbrianc 16y ago

That is also why the taxes are 52%. They have to nail everyone else who does work full time and earns a decent wage.

mpk 16y ago
Thanks for misrepresenting that. 52% is the highest tax bracket which most people won't hit. The brackets are 2.35%, 10.85%, 42% and 52%. The first two brackets also contain the Social Security payments - which the part-time workers definitely hit. (Edit for completeness : effectively the tax brackets end up as 33, 41, 42, 52).
danieldk 16y ago
The 52% rate only applies to the highest bracker of income (above € 54.776). Taxes on other brackets are far lower. The relative high tax rates also buy you good insurance, a government-sanctioned pension, coverage of some costs of studying, etc. Or in other words, taxes are relatively high because it is a welfare state.
- poundy 16y ago
  That's about $75,000. I am sure a lot of people pay that. Its nice to see that it also buys you better insurance, pretty good. That's the way it should be! In the UK all you get is the same kind of health care irrespective of your contribution.
  - zephyrfalcon 16y ago
    I think he means that the existence of high tax rates buys everyone good insurance, etc. I haven't heard of people in higher tax brackets getting better health insurance than those in lower ones. So it would be the same as in the UK. Then again, I left the Netherlands nine years ago, so who knows, maybe it has changed since then... =/
    - wil2k 16y ago
      You're correct zephyrfalcon. People get the same kind of health care, no matter if they earn a lot or not much compared to others.

RyanMcGreal 16y ago

Single page: http://www.slate.com/id/2274736/pagenum/all/ http://www.slate.com/id/2274736/pagenum/all/

danieldk 16y ago

To someone living in the Netherlands, feminism seems to be turned on its head here. After much pressure to increase participation, lots of women simply argue for their right to raise kids. So, they usually prefer working part-time and using other time as 'social time'. Now, if only us men demanded the same ;).

marquis 16y ago
Thanks for your reasonable comments on the topic. As a hard-working, caring female I was offended by the tone of this article. By the first paragraph she was making assumptions and generalisations, and I couldn't take the rest of the article seriously with her attempt to make the statistics fit. I'm familiar with Dutch culture fairly well and it has many complex reasons for it's social structures that I don't think should be glibly lacerated to fit a concept. I've always found the Netherlands a highly liberal, equal and exciting country to work in, whether you want to push yourself over long hours or go home at 5pm on the dot.
baguasquirrel 16y ago
FWIW, one of the more common complaints amongst the hackers I've hung out with is that they've wanted to work part-time so they can spend more time on hobby projects. Do kids count as hobby projects?

jeroen 16y ago

Is "less than 10 percent of women here are employed full-time" really that interesting? My sister works 32 hours a week, yet earns more than her husband. Sure, technically she doesn't work full-time, but I see no classical gender wars scenario here. My wife recently stopped working. I love my work, she started to resent hers and would rather spend her time on other things. I earn enough for both of us and with her now doing more of the housekeeping I have more free time as well. We're both happier this way, so where's the problem?

erikpukinskis 16y ago
There's no problem with your wife choosing not to work. The problem is when people attribute women's participation rates solely to "choice" and other benign phenomena. Some women very much want to work like hell and kick ass at work, and there are real barriers for them that we all need to continue working on taking down. In other words, the problem is if you stop caring about women's representation in your business, because you assume all women are like your wife. Not that I have any reason to think that's what you're doing. I'm just answering your question. :)
- jeroen 16y ago
  I agree, but I don't think the 10% number adds anything useful to that. I just wanted to show that not all of the other 90% of Dutch women are struggling to find employment or wishing they could work more hours.
btmorex 16y ago
Well, one problem is: "In 2000, a law was passed mandating that women have the right to cut back hours at their jobs without repercussions from employers." If the article's correct, that seems like it discriminates against men. If cutting back working hours is an important right, then why can't men do the same without repercussions?
- ben0x539 16y ago
  Because typically workplaces are already biased towards men and employers do not need more incentives not to disadvantage male employees, I suspect.

Female 16y ago

Apparently I'm Dutch! I only work 10 hours a week. And it's really awesome. My mother is really annoyed that she helped pay for my Ivy education, and is bugging for me to get a full time job. She jokes that I got my "Mrs." But other than that I love it.

dan00 16y ago

You never should have the right to feel right if you aren't getting ahead! ;) Strange, society tells us the way to go to feel right, but if we follow, nothing feels right.

maxklein 16y ago

It's difficult to be an ambitious person and also be very gentle and caring. One requires focus on the needs of other people, the other require focusing on your own needs and riding over people. Gender roles and families allow the existence of both emotional states within one entity - it is possible for a family to be made up of both a very human side and a very aggressive side. This maximises the success potential of a family unit - one half can be ambitiously working towards acquiring more, while the other can be ambitiously working towards building closer family ties and emotional support. When both parts of the family are aggressively working towards acquiring more, the softness of a family gets lost. There is less emotional dependence, less of one person doing one thing, and more of two people who have a lot of potential to be at loggerheads with one another. Raising a family and acquiring a lot of money require completely different emotional outlooks, and I believe that there are not many people who can make the switch from roughriding for money to being tender at home. Families need two different people fulfilling different roles to be successful. That's the evolutionary method, that's the method that is culturally agnostic and that has taken us as humans this far. Intellectually trying to force a different system to exist is causing unhappy societies and break-ups of family units that used to be happy. When couples say the other half completes them, they mean that the other person fills in some parts that they lack, they don't mean that the other is exactly the same as they are.

kurtosis 16y ago
why not take the simpler explanation that the reason families have broken up is that they actually weren't that happy? Also why doesn't having multiple people in a family earning an income lead to an increase in security? i.e. the impact of a (e.g. job loss, illness) can be buffered by the other partner's income.
- billswift 16y ago
  Only if they weren't already spending up to the limit (and past) of both incomes together. If one is working and loses his job, the other can get a job; if both are working and don't have any cushion, they are more likely to have a problem.
16y ago

fauigerzigerk 16y ago

I wonder about the different character of fulltime versus part time jobs. In most countries I know, part time equals boring. Maybe that's a little different in the Netherlands but I doubt that it's massively different, otherwise Dutch boardrooms would be full of part time executives. Since I firmly believe that women are just as eager and capable of taking on intellectual challenges as men are, I do indeed regard it as a problem if so many women do not make full use of their potential. Of course, that doesn't mean working more than 12 hours a day under extremely high pressure is the only or even the best way to use that potential.

JoachimSchipper 16y ago
Most jobs in the Netherlands can be done part-time. Yes, executive-level jobs are usually an exception, but you can be e.g. a part-time computer programmer without major issues. That said, full-times do earn more money and promotions.

fakelvis 16y ago

The problem I have with this article is that it is written in such an all-encompassing manner, using statistics that do not lend themselves directly to the conclusions presented (for example see jeroen's comment/thread [1]). Freely admitting that I surround myself with ambitious, passionate people, if I look purely at personal anecdotes, almost every female I know in this country would be horrified to be characterised like this. "Lackadaisical approach to their careers"? Coffee at 2p.m.? Snubbing advancement? There are one or two good comments on this at Yglesias / Think Progress: http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2010/11/dutch-women-and-part-time-work/ http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2010/11/dutch-women-and-pa... Now… if only I could persuade my girlfriend to stay in bed after 5:30 or come home before 20:00. [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1929618 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1929618

cracki 16y ago

"full-time" means spending your whole day earning money, just so you have no strength left to enjoy the "rest" of your day. i find that crazy too.

Samuel_Michon 16y ago

From the article: "less than 10 percent of women [in the Netherlands] are employed full-time." According to the Dutch governmental institution CBS (Statistics Netherlands), 59.7% of all Dutch women work. There are 8.4 million women in the Netherlands. 5 million of those are of working age. 967,000 women work full-time. If you only count women of working age, 20% of those work full-time. But even if you were to include infants, students and pensioners in the total, the percentage of women working full-time would be 12% -- higher than the "less than 10%" stated in the article. This is data that I found in 10 minutes, using CBS StatLine. It worries me that the author got such basic data wrong, data that is readily available. It makes me distrust the rest of the presented information as well. http://statline.cbs.nl/StatWeb/dome/?LA=EN http://statline.cbs.nl/StatWeb/dome/?LA=EN http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistics_Netherlands http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistics_Netherlands

roel_v 16y ago
I agree, when you look into it in that detail, but it's safe to say that full-time labor participation by women is low and certainly below 20%. Percentage of mothers who work 35 hours or more is 19 over the last 3 years. Then again, overall full time employment is low. 40 % of all jobs are for 35 hours per week or more. Distribution of them between men and women is probably lopsided but it does take some of the punch out of the 'womens' angle of the article. It's not so much just the women who work part time, it's everybody. This was illustrated by another mistake in the article - it's not just women who have a legal right to a reduction (or increase!) in the amount of hours, but the men, too.
sjs 16y ago
I don't think hard numbers were the focus of this post, and 10% vs 12% doesn't really change her point as far as I can see. edit: Even 20% doesn't change her point or personal experiences.
- JoachimSchipper 16y ago
  Including people who can't work is... suggestive.

afshin 16y ago

Financial independence is the only independence in a patriarchal society. Dutch society is pretty liberal, so it may be the case that financial dependence on men does not impinge upon the sense of freedom and well-being for Dutch women. I wonder if the same would hold true in a more conservative country like the US.

sethg 16y ago

I think this is just one example of the difference between European and American feminism. Feminist movements in the USA, the country where “all men are created equal”, have been most successful where they fought for formal equality between men and women—antidiscrimination laws, getting more women into traditionally male professions, punishing sexual harrassment, and so forth. In Europe, which has a much stronger culture of trade unionism, feminism has been more focused on advancing the interests of women as a class (in the same way that a railroad workers’ union would advance the interest of railroad workers as a class). So Europe leads the US in access to abortion, subsidized child care, quotas for women on political-party lists, and so forth. I’m not sure which of these approaches is better but they do lead to different outcomes.

cafard 16y ago

I'd be interested to know what the economic effect of divorce is in the Netherlands. The 1970s and after may have left a lot of American women thinking that they had to look out for themselves.

jacquesm 16y ago

Being Dutch I think I'm qualified to at least observe that plenty of men here too do not have full time jobs and love it. In fact, a fairly common situation is for both partners to work, but not full time.

c4urself 16y ago
I think that's a truer balance; not women doing exactly what men do (work 40 hours a week) but men working less and watching the kids one day a week, and women also working. (In Holland, 'papadag' is an understanding, that is, a day that fathers stay at home and watch the kids)
- roel_v 16y ago
  On a tangential note, I hate that word and will go out of my way to mock people who actually use it in a feeble attempt to curb its spread, even if I like the concept and will be doing it myself come June. To me it sounds like 'hey look at me, here I am one day a week looking after my kids, screw the 6 other days, I've done my share!'. I mean we don't call the day that the mother stays at home 'mommyday' either, because that would be ridiculous - every day is 'mommyday'. Not to rag on you, just bitching a bit ;)
  - yummyfajitas 16y ago
    Just guessing here, but I suspect you don't call the other day "mommyday" for the same reason you don't call regular days "daddyworkinghardtosupportthefamilyday". The normal state of affairs doesn't need a special term.

cageface 16y ago

I've been in Berlin for the last month and people in general here seem also to be less career-focused than Americans. People live well here but I sometimes miss the charge you sometimes feel in the air in the U.S. and even more in Asia.

smutticus 16y ago

I'm an American who has lived in Holland for 8 years so maybe I can offer some perspective. 1) The NL and the USA are different places with many many differences. As I often find myself telling my American friends "Stop comparing apples and oranges". Or the Dutch version "Stop comparing apples and pears". 2) There is less incentive in NL to work and it's easier to work part-time. I moved here partly because I wanted to take it easy after working my ass off in the USA. I now work part-time and love it. I know if I go back to the USA that would be really difficult. 3) The economic situation here is much easier than the USA. It's simply not as cutthroat and the government takes care of poor who need help. Whether that rubs you the wrong way ideologically is beside the point. It's easier to be poor here and not end up dead. 4) Dutch people definitely get depressed. That bit of the article is complete nonsense and I don't where that idea comes from. There are serious problems with depression in this country that show in suicide rates and alcohol abuse rates. Where are her numbers for this assertion?