Thursday, May 14, 2015

BEYOND WOMEN-FRIENDLY WELFARE STATES: Nordic’s Gender Gap Challenge


Feminist scholars have long examined the welfare state, looking at how policy outcomes affect women and men, especially those related to labor and care work. Nordic welfare states hold a long history of policies which have transformed labor and care participation. The region is often considered to have created the most successful model in raising gender equality. Nevertheless, gender gaps are still reported. Where has this welfare system gone wrong?


telegraph.co.uk


Labor vs. Care in Europe

As an ideal model, the welfare state refers to a state system where the state is responsible for the universal welfare of its citizens. However, in practice, provision for its citizens can be organized through a combination of government, voluntary, and private entities, such as in Western Europe and the Nordic region.

Feminist scholars have looked for examples of the ideal model of the welfare state in Nordic countries. For the past years, Nordic countries, such as Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Iceland—which using Esping-Andersen’s categorization of welfare states are grouped as social-democratic countries—have been leading in the Global Gender Gap Report with high female labor participation and leadership. Other European countries still lag behind this region. Some believe that the key to Nordic success is founded in their design of “family-friendly state policies” which sees labor and care as a right and which has done away with the male breadwinner family model.

In countries like Germany, Italy, and Spain, the male breadwinner model remains strong and the states are less supportive of female labor participation. A strong male breadwinner model and the principle that families have the right to choose how to care because caring is a private matter, have guided the UK to implement policies that are less family-friendly and with less recognition to unpaid care work. While the Netherlands, on the other hand, has the dual earner/dual carer model intact by encouraging women and men to work part-time in order to share care work in the home. However, in practice, it is older men who tend to work part-time.

Central and Eastern European countries during the Soviet regimes had also brought women into the labor force. Like the social-democratic countries, Soviet regimes provided state support for women’s care work; however, a great difference lies in the fact that while women were conceived as workers, no attempt was made to transform the traditional division of labor. With the collapse of the Soviet regimes, Central and Eastern Europe has had a strong male breadwinner model in place.

In contrast to other European countries, the Nordic countries—with their history of strong labor and feminist movements—have long been considered pioneers of care policies which were able to secure women’s participation in the labor market and at the same time promote the dual earner/dual carer model.


The Nordic Model of Labor and Care

Policies in the Nordic region have more recently included cash for care and mandatory paternal leave in combination with earlier policies on maternity leave and state-mandated parental leave. Studies confirm that generous parental leave in Nordic countries has positive effects on women’s labor participation, making it one of the highest among the OECD countries. In addition, a highly expensive scheme which provides access to subsidized day cares equipped with professional care workers is another reason, as studies also confirm, for the high rate of female participation in the labor force. Moreover, Nordic countries have gone beyond “women-friendly policies” as the aim of shared parental leave was not only to encourage higher female labor participation, but also to increase men’s contribution to caring. In fact, Sweden was the first country in the world to transform caring roles by replacing maternity leave with parental leave in 1974.

However, even the best models are not without flaws. Nordic countries have had a highly gender-segmented labor market as a result of generous parental leaves, with Sweden having the most flexible 480 days which entitles parents 80% of their wages. The lack of flexibility in the private sector and the inconvenience of career interruptions tend to make the option of taking longer leave unfavorable for workers in this sector, who are—by no coincidence— predominantly men. In contrast, the public sector, which holds more women, provides more flexibility for long-term leave, however for lower wages. Because men tend to be private sector employees with better pay, families cannot afford to let husbands take longer leaves—thus, men’s take-up of parental leave has been generally low. The overall result is a high female concentration in the public sector and male in the private, and less men doing unpaid care work.

As a solution, the father quota was introduced by Nordic governments in the 1990s in response to men’s low take-up of leave and to prevent statistical discrimination against all women in the workplace. The success of this policy differed in different countries (even abolished in Denmark), but men had since increasingly used their leave. Nevertheless, leave take-up differs along class lines. For example in 2011, it was men with a high level of education and good income that took most parental leave rather than the opposite; it was highly educated women with good income and a high position on the labor market that took the least parental leave compared to women with low education and income and weak association to the market. Moreover, while men used their leave to care for children, seldom used it to do housework, suggesting that women carry a double burden because they were the ones attending to it after work.

Studies in the past decade also show that the glass ceiling phenomenon existed for educated women in the upper wage distribution level. This is due to the effect of the gender-segmented labor conditions which—supported by the existing gender division of labor in the household—have resulted in turning women into primary carers who have less worth in the labor market. Thus, while narrowing class inequality, Nordic social-democracies have encountered a wider intraclass gender inequality gap at the upper end.
 
The more recent cash for care policy which was rolled out in the 2000’s, where parents can obtain cash in replacement of day care provision, came as a response to the view that families should have the right to choose different caring practices as well as to provide municipalities with policy flexibility. This policy has been considered by some as being in contradiction with policies that aim to transform gender roles because it may encourage mothers to stay longer at home caring for children and maintaining the household and in return will affect their status in the labor market.


Trade-offs and Challenges

The Nordic countries have gone beyond women-friendly policies to family friendly-policies that transform gender roles and support the dual earner/dual carer family model. In this model, participation in labor and care is considered a right. However, triggered by labor conditions, there are trade-offs for women. Labor market segmentation based on gender has developed due to women’s concentration in the public sector because of the sector’s flexibility to cater long-term leaves. In addition, class located gender inequality as a result of the welfare-based glass ceiling has developed for women in higher positions in the labor market. Because of all these, the male breadwinner family model may still somewhat remain in the Nordic region. Still, the father quotas are considered to be the first significant measure taken by Nordic governments to transform men into carers and not just women into workers, and thus challenge the traditional breadwinner model.

Key to the Nordic success is the states’ perception on gender relations and a strong civil society which was able to influence the approaches and objectives of welfare initiatives. Nevertheless, the municipalities also play an important role in shaping policy as there is a need to accommodate local flexibility. This could mean that practices may not always be fully in line with wider national goals or may raise the need to revisit these goals. In addition, the view that family matters are private continues to challenge the state’s role in directing care policies. Discourses which support the family’s right to choose caring practices seem to have been gaining influence in recent years and may set barriers to efforts in narrowing the gender gap and other inequalities.



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