One of my readers, named Anonymous, left me a comment about my post, “Does the Netherlands Care about its Women?” The comment was more or less negative. Paraphrasing her words, she said:
I am a Dutch woman, and you do not know what you are talking about. Since you know nothing about our country, let me tell you about it. First, women get paid less than men. Second, since the Netherlands never participated in World War II, women never needed to join the workforce and continued to work in the home. Child care is expensive. This is not the case in France, where women worked during the war.
Anonymous gave me her reasons to explain to me why women do not work in the Netherlands. First, she suggested that because women have a lower average wage than men for the same work, they are not motivated to enter the workforce. Second, she says that the women never needed to leave the home during the second world war, so laborforce participation stayed low and has stayed low relative to countries who participated in the war. Third, she claims that high child care costs cause women to stay at home.
Her comment is misguided. She misinterpreted the subject of my post as a criticism of non-working Dutchwomen. Taking a look back at my post, I wrote about the type of media coverage the Dutch got in the international media in the last few years and posited the question, do the Dutch want to improve female inclusion in its labor force? Then, I offered a few pieces of evidence, that, yes, there are some signs of positive effort in Dutch taxation policy and otherwise. There was no analysis into why Dutchwomen work part-time, at least not outside of explaining the failure of a 2001 tax policy. I will assume that she wanted to explain why women in the Netherlands tend to work part-time, even though she confused the two separate issues of female workforce participation and women working part-time.
Just for her sake, let’s say that my piece had only been about the historical reasons for which female labor force participation is low in the Netherlands. This does deserve attention, and it is a valid subject worth discussing. But first, let’s look at her arguments.
Anonymous cited generic arguments for the gender gap the workforce, arguments which would apply to any industrialized country. These were weak arguments. Stating that women make less than men and that child care costs a lot of money is not ground-breaking analysis into the situation. She could have been talking about any industrialized nation.
Why? Child care is expensive in general. Paying someone else to watch your kid is not the same as ordering a Value Meal from McDonalds. A 2011 OECD study showed that:
- The UK has the highest costs of childcare for any country apart from Switzerland – 26.6% of average family incomes, compared to an OECD average of 11.8%. France and the Netherlands both came at 10.4% and 10.1%, respectively.
- Just 67.1% of UK mothers, compared to 84% in Denmark, 78.5% in the Netherlands and 73.6% in France participate in the workforce.
Frenchwomen and Dutchwomen spend about the same on child care. If this were correlated to women working part-time or even at all, then France’s women would report high incidences of part-time working or homemaking as well. There has to be another factor in this story.
What about women being paid less than men in the Netherlands? Dutchwomen don’t have it has bad as Austrians, Koreans, Norwegians, or Americans, Quartz reported yesterday. While it’s important that Anonymous brought this up, it’s really not a compelling argument to explain why Dutchwomen don’t want to work full-time. On the contrary, it might explain why Dutchwomen, or all women, would want to work full-time. That is, to make more money.
Taxation has a lot to do with the fact that women in the Netherlands work so few hours. As I wrote in my blog post, women found a way to work less hours despite the new taxation scheme. Although it increased female labor force participation, it made working less hours more attractive than working full-time. Even the OECD agrees:
“Taxation influences the choice between home production and market work.”
A higher take-home pay is attractive, even if that means working less in the market and working more at home. This is what has happened in the Netherlands.
The other point that Anonymous made was not well-founded. She stated that women were never called upon to work during wartime, and childcare is expensive in the Netherlands. So, cultural norms of women and work did not change in the Netherlands. Looking at the United States, a country where women worked when their husbands and fathers were away fighting in World War II, attitudes toward working women barely changed. According to the National Archives:
Although some women had seen their World War II experience as an opportunity to attain permanent equality in the work place, attitudes toward labor and gender that had prevailed before the war re-emerged largely intact afterward.
The country was ready to let women step in to fill vacancies during wartime, but once soldiers returned home, women were systematically let go, especially married and older women.
It’s really tempting to use the same, old arguments to explain why women aren’t making gains in the work place. However, the data is compelling and provide a clearer picture of the issue. It’s not accurate to make a generalization. But it is when you have evidence to back up the claim.