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.
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.
Statistics suggest otherwise:
¶ As more women have entered the workforce over the past few decades, the divorce rate, contrary to popular expectation, has gone down.
¶ US states where women have a higher labor force participation rate have lower divorce rates.
¶ Couples in which the wife an be considered a “career woman” have a 25 percent lower chance of divorce.
--- If you accept divorce rate as an indicator for a failed family.
For instance, what if families with two hard-working parents spend less time together but still find a level of contact that's need-filling. They grow neither happy nor unhappy enough to divorce. It's a stable but weak and unnurturing family and perhaps isn't the best place to bring up a young child.
Failure of a family is multifaceted and the op puts forth a theory too strong to be knocked down merely by decreased divorce rates.
(Edited: In light that the statistics the author quoted might be wrong, I'm should disclaim that I don't personally think that the polar-opposites parental style we're talking about here is best. I just want to advocate caution judging family-style health by divorce.)
It’s not a perfect indicator, but it is what the economists would call “a revealed preference”. I understand that people can have all sorts of reasons for remaining in an unhappy marriage, but I would expect that all other factors being equal, a large-scale social trend that makes the average marriage less happy would also lead to more people becoming unhappy enough to bail out.
The original argument was never about marriages being "less happy". It was about them being less healthy, less caring, less connected. It's quite likely that they're happy enough to not want to divorce without being a stable, healthy family producing a good environment to raise a child.
I grew up outside of the US with an American mother i'd characterize as post-feminist. She taught me that men and women are equal but not the same.
I meet a lot of women in the states who have adopted career advancement and a high salary as their version of "success". I had a long conversation with a female friend of mine who graduated from Stanford, worked as a VC. She said that there is a lot of pressure from other women to go into business and be competitive. That if as a woman you decide "I want to have a family and raise children", you're selling out.
With all of the effort for women's rights (and there is still more to be done), no one is defending a woman's right to be a successful mother and homemaker.
A Stanford graduate working as a VC is hardly a representative of an "average" woman. It may be hard for HN readers to imagine b/c so many of us are city dwellers, but there are parts of the US where it is still socially unacceptable for women to defy traditional gender roles.
I'm saying that I believe her problem to be a unique consequence of her very unusual social situation. It's not a problem that most women have.
Incidentally, how do you think a man would be treated if he finished his degree at Stanford Business and decided to be a homemaker? would it be different than a man who graduated from another school in another field?
Proponents of third-wave feminism claim that it allows women to define feminism for themselves by incorporating their own identities into the belief system of what feminism is and what it can become through one's own perspective. In their introduction to the idea of third-wave feminism in Manifesta, authors Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards suggest that feminism can change with every generation and individual:
"The fact that feminism is no longer limited to arenas where we expect to see it-- NOW, Ms., women's studies, and redsuited Congresswomen-- perhaps means that young women today have really reaped what feminism has sown. Raised after Title IX and "William Wants a Doll", young women emerged from college or high school or two years of marriage or their first job and began challenging some of the received wisdom of the past ten or twenty years of feminism. We're not doing feminism the same way that the seventies feminists did it; being liberated doesn't mean copying what came before but finding one's own way-- a way that is genuine to one's own generation."
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.
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.
Even if those two kinds of roles were as incompatible as you claim, which I don't believe for a second, why would the separation of roles run along gender lines instead of individual preferences?
It seems to me that you are implying a natural suitability and inclination of women for being gentle and caring and a natural ability of men to be totally focused assholes taking on all the intellectual challenges.
I think his point is that an ambitious person, either male or female, tends to try and find a caring and nurturing person as their soulmate and spouse, as a natural way of balancing the family relationships.
It certainly doesn't need to always be males who are ambitious and females who are nurturing; my uncle has been a stay-at-home father for 16 years while his wife has been an ambitious doctor who is always on call.
To be fair, OP didn't say that either role should always be fulfilled by any particular gender, just that it's good to have a mix in a family. In fact, he didn't mention gender at all, so it could also apply to families where the partners are homosexual.
Are you saying that's not true? Certainly males are more aggressive than females (like in many mammalian species), and certainly women have caring, child-rearing instincts.
I don't know what are instincts, what is culture and what are just stereotypes of either. However that may be, my opinion as a male is that I should not be kept in a zoo because someone thinks I have a natural inclination for killing and raping others. My personal experience tells me that it would be completely bonkers to think that women aren't just as sharp and focused as men on average.
You forgot to list the cons of both parents being very gentle and caring. Why does one half need be "ambitiously working towards acquiring more"?
The candid materialism of Americans (if you pardon the assumption) never ceases to amaze me. Want a "successful" family, start paying more attention to other things not exchangeable for green pieces of paper.
America's long history of unchecked ambition hasn't always been great for its citizens' well-being, but it's the reason why we put a man on the moon, have 10 of the world's 10 best research universities, and are known for larger-than-life aspirations and achievements.
even if that is correct, the problem comes when you tie it into gender roles. societal factors tend to deny families the ability to choose which partner will play which roles.
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?
"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.
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.
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.
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'.
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.
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?
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.
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)
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'.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
Being Dutch, I may be too close to see clearly - but I don't really see your "cliques". But yes, we are more business-like with acquaintances than an American would be.
Pre-WW2 Dutch society was divided into a couple of large groups, with Catholics, Protestants, Socialists and Liberals (pretty much "the rest") having their own newspapers, schools, etc. This is much less true nowadays - a lot of integration happened during and shortly after WW2 - but it's still quite noticeable (look at public television or catholic/protestant schools). Were you perhaps thinking of this?
Yes, WW2 is an important part of our history, and the source of pretty much the only national myths we have (which tend to paint the Dutch as brave resistance fighters.) "Nazi" is still the worst insult we have.
Of course, with the rise of Fortuyn, Verdonk and now Wilders, one can doubt whether the appropriate lessons have been learned/retained...
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'm Dutch and have spent all my 34 years here. In the last two years I have found 4 new friends and my last three jobs (8 years in total) have left me with a good friend each.
I'm also an introvert and spend about 80 hours a week behind my laptops.
If you experience the Dutch as clique-oriented, you might be looking in the wrong places. In my experience cities with a university have a more open culture.
I'm not sure what you mean there but WWII was 65 years ago and I've not heard anyone being called a 'collaborator' in the 40 years of my life here. It's just not an issue.
>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 think that's largely true. If we want to meet people we tend to just go to bars and cafes, do sports or go to concerts. We tend to leave our neighbours alone, give them their space. We do practically live on top of each other
so it just seems common sense.
>it's not somewhere I'd want to live, especially as an outsider.
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.
I second this. As an expat living here for the past 3 years this has been my experience also. The Dutch are open and sociable but creating bonds is where it seems to stop. And this is not just in relation to expats. I've met Dutch people who have moved to Amsterdam/Utrecht from other cities and were basically hanging out with expats. I've actually talked to them about this, and they've expressed the same feelings.
From my observations it's usually that the Dutch have a small group of friends (usually knowing each other since being little or high school) and they don't really feel the need to either make new ones or let anyone else in.
This does come of as being cold though.
"From my observations it's usually that the Dutch have a small group of friends (usually knowing each other since being little or high school) and they don't really feel the need to either make new ones or let anyone else in."
Yeah this is spot on. It makes it hard to make friends even when moving cities. You still hang out with the old crowd even if they're a couple of hours away, because finding a new group is just so hard.
(Belgian migrated to the Netherlands here, who does this himself - it's easier to make local friends in the expat crowd that it is with the locals. Still I associate mostly with my old friend from high school).
I don't want to speculate as to why, but generally I agree that social relationships are strained.
I live in Delft where there is a substantial body of foreign students and phds and I love their social openness.
Dutch people tend to settle in small, rigid cliques. It's hard for anyone to mingle and make new friends. When you're having a beer with some people and one person announces he/she is leaving for a party don't expect to be invited to come along.
clique-oriented, where you have your close friends from a very young age, but casual acquaintances keep each other at arms length much moreso
That's how I feel in Vienna, too, despite making huge efforts to find/make friends (like throwing conferences, hosting UGs, parties, etc). Even my Austrian friends who are from outside the city have the same problems. I've decided to give up.
It seems to be tied to a fear of novelty… people are too comfortable, but they complain about the advantages they have. Everything here is so goshdarn nice and even that it seems like people have lost the ability to "stretch" to deal with something new, different, or unexpected. (And sadly that seems to extend to people.) In fact, even their own emotions seem muted -- rather than excitement, or passion, or even hate, or joy, everything seems to be fairly even. Simple example: it's very rare to find someone laughing in a restaurant or cafe, and if you do, others will stare.
This social posture seems to be a lot more common in Europe than in, say, the US. And more common yet again in the Germanic cultures (incl. Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Netherlands, and most of Scandinavia) than in the Latin cultures.
Who knows if it's echoes from the war or something else.
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"
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...).
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?
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. :)
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.
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?
Maybe a misunderstanding, but the law in question (WAA) does not mention male or female employees but deals only with the right of changing th eweekly work hours for everyone. It is probably exercised most often after child birth, other than that, I would think that "women have the right" is wrong as a statement.
Lots of men work part-time too... In fact it's fairly common to see both spouses work part time to have a higher-than-single provider income, yet not be in the traces 40 hours per week.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
That's about $75,000. I am sure a lot of people pay that. Its nice to see that it also buys you better insurance, pretty good. That's the way it should be! In the UK all you get is the same kind of health care irrespective of your contribution.
I think he means that the existence of high tax rates buys everyone good insurance, etc. I haven't heard of people in higher tax brackets getting better health insurance than those in lower ones. So it would be the same as in the UK. Then again, I left the Netherlands nine years ago, so who knows, maybe it has changed since then... =/
You cannot compare salaries in Europe and the US directly. For example, average salary after mandatory payment to health care, retirement and unemployment insurance is around 26000 euros/year for men in France (http://www.insee.fr/fr/themes/tableau.asp?reg_id=0&id=38, official statistical institute in France, generally considered very reliable). This means something like 34000 euros / year before any taxes. So no, not many people earn 75000$ / year.
I'm aware, thank you. 'Roadnottaken' changed his/her post after I commented. I understand that makes it look like I was referring to the phrase "The Netherlands' are high".
Those numbers are not very accurate I think, they are too general. For example, VAT in France is 19.6 % only for a portion of products: medicines, food is around 6 %, while some other products are heavily taxed (the usual gas, tobacco, etc... where most of the price is taxes).
I've thought about moving their and ran the numbers. It's comparable to the US when you include local/state/property taxes and health care. Services in the US are a la carte, Europe is all-inclusive.
The word tax is misrepresentative - they don't buy you the same thing at all in Europe and in the US. Although most European also use tax to name anything they have to pay to the gvt agencies, a significant part of it buys you things you have to pay for yourself in the US, like health care and retirement.
You can argue about the services you get, but comparing directly taxes without taking into account the services provided in return is disingenuous.
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.