With part-time work the norm among young Dutch mothers, is it any surprise that they are happier than their counterparts in other countries around the world?
FOR OUT-OF-WORK Irish women, including victims of the current economic malaise, Wieteke Spruijt-de Boer’s decision to turn down a choice of potentially fulfilling, well-paid full-time jobs recently might be greeted with astonishment.
Yet the 44-year-old Dutch mother of four, a trained psychologist, currently unemployed, is determined to hold out for a part-time job of no more than three days a week since her contract in sales with an agency marketing drugs on behalf of pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly ended.
In common with most working women in the Netherlands today she believes there is more to life than the treadmill and stress of long hours and total commitment of a demanding full-time job, at the expense of family and leisure time.
“My husband has a hectic job running several businesses, and is often away. With four children, including twins, we decided that his career was more important. I really enjoy work and the adrenaline and some pressure; I could have chosen 10 jobs if I opted to be full-time, but three days is the maximum I want.
“Most of my friends also work part-time and are satisfied with that choice. They see it as the best solution, especially when children are still young, allowing time for themselves and for hobbies and personal fulfilment,” explains Spruijt-de Boer. Some 65 per cent of Dutch working women work part-time, compared with 37 per cent in Ireland, 22 per cent in France and less than 19 per cent in the US.
Women in the Netherlands are a lot happier than their counterparts in most other parts of the world because they have more personal freedom, including the choice to tailor work to their situation and needs, says Dutch psychologist Ellen de Bruin, author of the book Dutch Women Don't Get Depressed.
Illustrating the argument with the findings of a study by Erasmus University in Rotterdam in which Dutch women scored highest – 7.5 on a scale from one to 10 – on life satisfaction, de Bruin is convinced that the key to a Dutch woman’s happiness is her sense of personal freedom and a good work-life balance.
Far from wanting to shatter the glass ceiling and reach the top in the office hierarchy, earning the same respect and salaries as men, like women in the US (whom surveys show are not getting any happier), Dutch women, considered extremely progressive, appear to be doing the opposite. Government incentives to encourage our Dutch “sisters” into full-time employment have consistently failed, and less than 5 per cent of women wish they had more working hours or increased responsibility in the workplace, refusing extended hours even when the opportunity for advancement comes along.
The high cost of childcare is sometimes cited as a disincentive to full-time work, while others point to a traditional Dutch stigmatisation of full-time working mothers of young families.
Joop Kalden, a retired senior management consultant with decades’ experience of running work training and advancement programmes, says that “women sometimes show a reluctance to take on all that commitment. Senior positions can and are filled part-time through women in a job-share arrangement, but continuity can be lost that way, so employers choose the man believing that he can be relied on not to rush off home when a child is ill.”
The soccer-mom syndrome does make it difficult for ambitious career women to have themselves taken seriously as full-time employees, adds another senior executive from the US but based in the Netherlands.
Yet 62 per cent of women working part-time in the Netherlands don’t have young children in the house, and mothers rarely increase their working hours even when their children leave home.
"We look at the world of management – and it's a man's world – and we think, 'Oh, I could do that if I wanted'," Maaike van Lunberg, an editor at De Stentornewspaper, has been quoted as saying, "but I'd rather enjoy my life."
As Marieke van den Berg, a interior designer who runs her own company in the Dutch city of Sneek, puts it: “When you are full-time working in Holland and all is going well with your family and life people say ‘wow! you are amazing, a supermum’ – as soon as things go wrong and the children start performing badly at school they are quick to say, ‘you should stop work and stay home with the kids’.
“Women do not support each other enough, they can be judgmental and old-fashioned . There is definitely still a stigma about full-time working mothers here in the Netherlands.”
Still, a lot of part-time working mothers she knows have it nicely worked out: three days’ work, two days for themselves – hairdresser, pedicure, meeting friends for coffee, shopping – and two more at the weekend, devoted completely to their families.
Becoming financially independent should not be underestimated by Dutch women, according to Sytske Haveman, who has a background in media and public relations and who lived for many years in various countries around the world.
As an expat wife and mother, now back in her native country, she believes that in general Dutch women have a better quality of life than abroad.
Now training as a furniture upholsterer and restorer, she says: “The part-time work ethic is part of what we are here. Dutch women are still the principal carers for their children. It’s a tradition, like breastfeeding, instilled into us.
“You do have the best of both worlds by opting for part-time work.
“When I look at women in the UK or other countries where I have lived, they were either at home, not working at all or they were working all hours, juggling so much responsibility and also taking care of family and home.”
According to the author of Dutch Women Don't Get Depressed, men do not get off the hook because their wives are working part-time.
Modern men are expected to fully share the chores at home.
“The Dutch woman wants the man to do housework to help her feel equal, but he has to do it her way.”
This raises the question: do Dutch men get depressed? Apparently not.
De Bruin reasons that Dutch men tend to like their women bossy, while Dutch women are not keen on macho men.
- The Netherlands scores well as a good country for women and surveys show a high level of emancipation, contentment and political participation. Yet fewer than 10 per cent of women in the Netherlands are in full-time employment, and they like it that way. According to July 2011 figures from the CBS (Central Bureau for Statistics) only 2 per cent of Dutch women with partners who work full-time want to work full-time also. Fewer than 4 per cent of women wish they had more working hours or increased responsibility in the workplace
Disappeared housewives in Scandinavia: Where have they gone?
Visitors to Scandinavia during the working week might be forgiven for thinking the Pied Piper of Hamelin had just conducted a raid. For where have all the children gone?
Public playgrounds are empty, only pensioners feed the ducks in public parks and the swings and trampolines that dot suburban gardens have only the birds for company.
The kids, of course, haven’t been kidnapped – they’re playing and squabbling and squealing away with their friends in the nearest kindergarten. And, actually, they do make occasional appearances on the streetscape – but only in groups of 20 or more, being shepherded around by professional minders bringing them on excursions to the swimming pool, museum or theatre.
This is the Nordic norm, and has been so for decades. Parents work and kids attend kindergarten and preschool until they enter formal education at the age of seven.
Up to the age of 12 or so, public policy ensures cheap youth-club facilities for youngsters to bridge the few hours between the end of the school day and the parents’ arrival home from work.
The salient point here is that both parents work – largely by choice. Denmark has the highest rate of female participation in the workforce in the EU at 71 per cent. In non-EU Iceland and Norway, 76 per cent and 73 per cent of women work outside the home, and the gap to male employment levels in all cases is among the world’s slightest.
Those not in jobs tend to be unwillingly idle, undergoing education or on early retirement or disability benefit schemes.
“The housewife culture has completely disappeared, and this is irreversible,” says Anette Borchorst, a professor at Denmark’s Aalborg University.
Stockholm University’s Prof Drude Dahlerup agrees, describing Denmark as a “housewifeless country”.
“We had housewives in Scandinavia until the 1960s, but they gradually disappeared,” she says. “There’s no prestige in it any more.”
Both academics point to public policy as a key force behind this evolution. For decades, successive governments, whether left- or right-leaning, have bolstered those social structures that facilitate female employment: childcare and elderly care.
In Denmark, kindergarten fees are regulated by law to a maximum of 25 per cent of an institution’s operating costs, meaning infants are minded for as little as €300 a month. This fee usually covers nappies, food and excursions, and the targeted teacher-child ratio is 1:3.
Simultaneously the various countries have poured billions into ensuring equal educational opportunities for women and men. Scandinavian women have no excuse not to work, and those very few who choose not to are regarded as pariahs by their peers.
Though the welfare state provides a rather wide safety net for those who become unemployed, it has scant sympathy – and no handouts – for women who just want to have quality time with their kids. Quite simply, this is regarded as an indulgence and a dereliction of every citizen’s duty to work, pay tax and fill the coffers that keep the whole machine running.
Welfare top-ups for part-timers in Denmark have been slashed and even those in receipt of full-time unemployment benefit must clock up 300 hours’ work per year (delivering newspapers or such like) to retain eligibility.
A raft of measures target immigrants from non-EU countries whose cultural norms favour women staying at home with young kids.
Recently, there was talk of legislation to force these second-generation kids into kindergarten. Though it failed to become law, few Danes voiced serious objections to the idea. And while more Nordic women than men work part-time, it is not always by choice and only rarely as a childcare measure.
Recent figures from Denmark’s statistics agency show that one-sixth of these women would work full-time if they had the chance and that only 1.25 per cent went part-time to take care of children.
An anecdote from Prof Borchorst illustrates the Nordic ubiquity of women’s will to work; in 2006 the Norwegian government, which was then headed up by the Christian Democrats, introduced a cash-for-care scheme to allow harried mums to stay at home with their offspring. But though it made it to the statute books, it quickly fizzled out of sight.
“Women just weren’t interested,” Prof Borchorst says.
- CLARE MacCARTHYin Copenhagen
