Pernilla Tunberger and Wendy Sigle-Rushton
If we think of public policy as an effort to move from “how things are” to “how we would like them to be,” it becomes clear that we cannot understand policy logics without reference to the context in which they were developed. Certain aspects of “how things are” will be taken for granted, and others will be deemed an essential part of the problem that policy is trying to solve, and this will vary substantially across time and place. When the object of study is family policies and their gendered consequences, the need to take context into account in this way is immediately apparent. Family policies incorporate assumptions about how families operate, they make assumptions about the right and proper organization of earning and caring, and they attempt to effect change. The wider context informs, modifies, and constrains each of these in nontrivial ways. Moreover, intended effects can be bolstered or weakened to the extent that they resonate with prevailing social norms and institutional structures.
The aim of this chapter is to describe and compare the trends and innovations of family policies in the European Union (EU) and the United States, from the latter part of the twentieth century to the present day, taking into account cross-national differences in the wider political objectives, the underlying policy logics, and the consequences for different population groups. For ease of presentation and to facilitate our analysis, we consider two broad periods: the period of rapid social and economic change that took hold from the early to the mid-1970s, when attempts to respond to and manage change led to significant cross-national variations in the way welfare states have understood, constructed, and interacted with the family, and the period from the mid-1990s, when developments in the EU, perhaps because of its limited remit in areas of social policy, resulted in European family policy becoming more closely linked to economic and fiscal concerns. In addition, developments of the EU approach to social policy such as the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) provided space for cross-national policy sharing and peer evaluation (Heidenreich and Bischoff, 2008), the result of which was some level of convergence in policy frames and, to a lesser extent, policy approaches. Nonetheless, previously well-established patterns of gendered and social stratification persist.
From their earliest stage of development, most advanced welfare states made efforts to support families by subsidizing the costs of raising children. Motivated by concerns about poverty and inequality and, in some countries, by the desire to increase birthrates, most advanced welfare states developed redistributive mechanisms that targeted fathers’ earnings (Shaver and Bradshaw, 1995). For the most part, these family policies originated in a setting where the male breadwinner/female carer gendered division of labor was either taken as given or deemed optimal. Even in countries with relatively high rates of female labor market participation such as France, family policies were developed that often presumed that mothers of (young) children would withdraw from the labor market and care for them at home (Misra and Jude, 2008; Jenson and Kantrow, 1990). As a consequence, family policies aimed to make it easier for men to maintain an economically dependent wife and children (Shaver and Bradshaw, 1995).
During the economic boom that followed World War II, many countries suffered from labor shortages. While some relied mostly on guest workers to provide the labor needed, others actively chose to also promote female labor market participation, including that of mothers (Rosenbluth, Light, and Schrag, 2002). Most formal guest worker programs were closed by the early 1970s (Castles, 2006), but their legacy left an important mark on European societies. The differing strategies chosen effectively created, or reconfirmed, different notions of the family as an institution, the gendered division of labor within it, and the division of labor between family, state, and market.
In subsequent years, rapid social and economic change saw the logic and the desirability of the male breadwinner/female carer family substantially undermined. Economic stagnation and labor market changes, driven in part by increased global competition and social dumping, made male employment less well remunerated and far more unstable. In addition, increasingly high rates of family dissolution meant that many children lived apart from their fathers. As a consequence, family policies which presumed a steadily present and continuously employed male breadwinner increasingly failed to reflect the reality of people’s lives. Although female employment increased markedly in all countries, albeit to very different extents, the need to accommodate caring responsibilities meant that the pay, hours, and continuity of women’s employment, mothers’ employment in particular, often fell far short of the (historic) male standard, contributing to the economic vulnerability of the growing number of single-mother families. While these trends touched all advanced welfare states to some extent, they were more pervasive in some than in others. The pace (and, to some extent, the nature) of family change in Italy, for example, lagged behind other wealthy countries (Perelli-Harris et al., 2010, 2012). Moreover, policymakers interpreted and sought to manage these changes in different ways. Nordic countries, Denmark and Sweden in particular, had started promoting female labor market participation much earlier, but during the 1970s, the institutional framework meant to facilitate women’s work–family reconciliation and to deliver greater economic independence to women was strengthened. Antidiscrimination and sexual harassment legislation in the United States removed institutional barriers to female employment while leaving the negotiation of work and care to the family and the market, creating very different living conditions and possibilities for women in different family structures and socioeconomic positions (O’Connor, Orloff, and Shaver, 1999; Orloff, 2006). In contrast to the other two approaches, which attempted to accommodate change in one way or another, Continental European welfare states, by and large, continued to actively subsidize a male breadwinner/female carer family (Sigle-Rushton and Kenney, 2003; Misra and Jude, 2008).
The increasingly divergent logics characterizing these increasingly divergent policy trajectories, and the notions of the family they represented, have been the object of extensive feminist scholarship. Reacting to the gender blindness of mainstream welfare regime scholarship (in particular, the work of Esping-Andersen, 1990), feminist scholars criticized the relatively limited attention accorded to the family and to institutional support for particular gendered divisions of labor within it (for an overview, see Orloff, 2009). Some researchers sought to integrate family and gender issues more explicitly (see, e.g., Lewis, 1992; Orloff, 1993; Lister, 1994). Others have used divergent policy trends to motivate the development of frameworks that summarize cross-national variations in outcomes that are likely to be linked to divergent family policy trends (Sigle-Rushton, 2009). For example, taking the social foundations of variations in the development of direct care services by the welfare state as her point of departure, Pfau-Effinger (2005) devised a framework to describe broad cross-national similarities and differences in the way paid work and care is organized or arranged at the societal level. The dual-earner/state-carer arrangement, which characterized the Nordic approach, outsources important parts of care work to the state through institutionalized child and elderly care, while all adults are encouraged and expected to participate in paid labor. In the modernized male breadwinner arrangement, found in the United Kingdom and parts of Continental Europe, state support for child and elderly care is relatively underdeveloped, and the presumption seems to be that women’s labor market participation will accommodate and be organized around their housework and caring responsibilities. As a consequence, large gender gaps in hours worked or Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) employment rates, both between men and women and between mothers and childless women, are observed. The third arrangement, the dual earner/family carer, is also characterized by poorly developed state services and so appears to leave responsibility for care work to families. In contrast to the modernized male breadwinner arrangement, however, gender differences in employment participation and hours worked are narrower. This arrangement has tended to emerge in settings with low levels of social spending combined with high levels of wage inequality (making an economically dependent wife, even if the “ideal,” out of reach for many families), such as the United States and Southern European countries. Although the framework was devised to summarize cross-national variations in gendered time allocations, the two latter models might also coexist in the same country, particularly when economic pressures for welfare state retrenchment are strong and the generosity of state support is reduced. Those families who can afford to live on one income have a greater possibility to choose which model to follow, while families who need two incomes are more limited to the dual-earner/family-carer model.
Pfau-Effinger (2005) classifies countries according to the extent to which they provide institutionalized childcare and promote women’s paid work, and it is noteworthy that the framework does not address men’s employment patterns or their allocation of time between work and care. To some extent, this is not surprising. It reflects the most salient differences in family policy logics up until the early 1990s, which seemed to take men’s full-time employment and their unavailability for care work as given. Looking cross-nationally, the most relevant fault lines concerned whether and how much the employment of women (or more precisely mothers) should be encouraged and how much the work of the housewife could and should be provided outside of the family and the private sphere. Although in recent years, European trends have been more in the direction of convergence toward a modified, modernized male breadwinner arrangement with strong emphasis on some level of labor market participation of all adults, and there has been some discussion of whether and to what extent policies should incentivize a redistribution of some portion of men’s time from paid work to care, the level and generosity of state care services continues to shape, reinforce, and differentiate the (classed and) gendered allocations of paid work and care in advanced welfare states in important ways.
The effectiveness of policies which presume and support the male breadwinner/female carer model to provide income security is conditioned upon children being born within marriage (or some other formally recognized union), union stability, as well as male employment security. Similarly, the new policy logics that characterize the family policy regimes that began to emerge since the 1970s presume and rely on certain ambient conditions in order to achieve their intended effects. When those conditions change, the logic of the approach is contradicted, and there is likely to be pressure for policy approaches to adapt to and accommodate change.
Similarly to the male breadwinner/female carer model, the modernized male breadwinner model still presupposes that women will be financially dependent on men and thus relies on men’s ability to specialize in paid employment and on the stability of marriage (or some other formally recognized union) – a risky strategy for women since neither can be taken for granted (Sigle-Rushton, 2010). The dual-earner/family-carer model relies on high rates of employment for both women and men, and also on the possibility to organize care work without the help of the state. Grandparent care was common as rates of female labor market participation increased, but its availability is likely to be reduced as grandmothers increasingly participate in the labor market themselves, and the age of retirement is increased in many countries (Sigle-Rushton and Kenney, 2003). Relying on the formal or informal market for care provision is another solution, where countries with greater wage dispersion on the formal labor market, and less strict employment regulation, such as the United States, offer greater possibilities for purchasing care on the formal market. In many European countries, families have, in recent years, turned to the informal market, and similarly to the United States, migrants have supplied a low-cost supply of care workers (Hochschild, 2000; Parreñas, 2001; Lutz, 2002; Ungerson, 2004; Bettio et al., 2006; Simonazzi, 2009). The dual-earner/state-carer model, finally, depends heavily both on the employment security for women and men and on the state providing extensive childcare services available to all and of satisfactory quality; if the middle class starts choosing other ways of organizing their childcare, political support for public financing is likely to decline, effectively compromising the system (cf. Korpi and Palme, 1998).
The coherence and effectiveness of any particular arrangement will likely change as a consequence of changing surrounding institutions, just as in the case of the male breadwinner/female carer model, potentially leading to missed policy goals and/or unwanted side effects such as decreasing birthrates or the undermining of the public care sector. Changes in surrounding institutions, moreover, can work to reinforce or undermine policy efforts. Limited possibilities for productivity gains in the labor-intensive care sector (sometimes referred to as the “cost disease”; see Donath, 2000; Himmelweit, 2007) that all advanced welfare states have had to grapple with as economies globalized, fertility declined, and the relative size of the working-age population stabilized and began to fall pose particular problems for the dual-earner/state-carer arrangement. A failure to increase productivity in line with more capital-intensive sectors means that the cost of care services relative to other types of goods increases, an outcome which, at face value, can be interpreted as a failure on the part of the welfare state. However, attempts to increase productivity will likely result in reduced quality (Himmelweit, 2007), which also risks undermining support for the system. Family dissolution and long spells of single motherhood, on the other hand, pose particular problems for the modernized male breadwinner arrangement. In the absence of a male breadwinner’s income, the costs will be especially high either fiscally (in terms of providing income support) and/or socially (in terms of unacceptably high child poverty risks). A different challenge is labor market flexibilization and the greater difficulties for especially young adults to acquire permanent employment and the economic security needed to set up independent households and form families (Blossfeld et al., 2005). Especially in Southern Europe, the lack of employment security for young adults seems to prolong transitions to adulthood and to depress birthrates (Bernardi and Nazio, 2005; Mills et al., 2005; Esping-Andersen, 2007).
Although Pfau-Effinger’s (2005) framework distinguishes different levels of state involvement in the provision of care, and this is clearly a key policy variable, the framework does not explicitly incorporate either differences in the distribution of care work that is not provided by the state or differences in the structure and organization of the labor market. As a consequence, countries which Pfau-Effinger classified as having the same arrangement are somewhat heterogeneous in how they organize care. For example, where care work is not taken on as a state responsibility, in some countries, families tend to purchase care on the market, while in others, there is a stronger reliance on informal care arrangements. So although each of the arrangements suggests particular behavioral and material consequences for families with children, and particular policy challenges in the face of change, the broader social and economic context is also important for understanding their relationship with patterns of gender inequality and social stratification in any particular setting.
Using the concept of care regimes (Bettio and Plantenga, 2004), which more explicitly address the division of care labor between the family, the state, and the market, Bettio et al. (2006) and Simonazzi (2009) illustrate important variations in terms of both the female labor market participation and the creation of formal and informal markets for care work. Their work demonstrates how the structure of the labor market makes certain ways of organizing care work more feasible than others (Donath, 2000; Morgan, 2005). This is an important observation because it suggests that responses to similar (or even the same) policies (or lack of policies) may well differ both within and across welfare states. For example, high levels of wage inequality allow more people to purchase care on the market, potentially facilitating women’s labor market participation at both the higher (as purchasers) and lower ends (by providing job opportunities) of the pay scale. At the same time, such a structure requires greater intragender inequality and, as a consequence, greater socioeconomic inequality. Poor women are most likely to take the caring jobs with the lowest pay. Such care chains will furthermore inevitably leave some children or elderly at the end of the chain without adequate care (Hochschild, 2000; Parreñas, 2001). A more compressed wage composition, on the other hand, means the cost of purchasing care will be expensive relative to women’s earnings. The state must step in to provide care, or women will be forced to stay out of paid work and specialize in unpaid care work – thereby entrenching gender inequality at all socioeconomic levels.
In order for women (and men) to be able to combine earning and parenthood (or other care responsibilities), it must therefore be affordable to outsource care in some way, meaning that it must be possible to combine work and care and it must “pay to work.” The literature offering a gendered analysis of the theory of varieties of capitalism (Hall and Soskice, 2001) argues that generous family policy can make work pay less for women in general by turning mothers into less reliable workers and, as a consequence, encouraging structural discrimination of all women (Mandel and Shalev, 2009; Mandel, 2010; see also Estevez-Abe, 2009; Folbre, 2009 and Rubery, 2009). The argument is that generous maternity leave tends to be a feature of more generous welfare states, which in turn typically coincide with what is labeled Coordinated Market Economies (CMEs). CMEs, typically found in Continental Europe, are characterized by labor markets based on workers with specialized skills, strong employment protection, and each employee being an important investment for the employer. These economies offer stronger protection for workers than Liberal Market Economies (LMEs) – such as the United States and the United Kingdom – which are characterized by workers with general, transferrable skills, low employment protection, greater wage dispersion, and high labor market mobility. Companies in CMEs are assumed to search for highly committed workers and therefore to be reluctant to employ women if they are likely to take long maternity leaves or to lack commitment to the organization. This suggests that the kind of jobs women, and different groups of women, are able to take – and what conditions those jobs come with – depends to a great extent on how care work is organized, the labor market, and the welfare system.
By considering the labor market structure and family policy as part of a wider system, it becomes clear that the gendered and classed outcomes can vary substantially across countries that are classified, according to Pfau-Effinger’s (2005) framework, as having the same earning and caring arrangement. The modernized male breadwinner model relies on the possibility for a family to live on one income, and therefore on high wage levels and/or social transfers subsidizing that type of arrangement. In an LME, such a model is likely to coexist with the dual-earner/family-carer model, given that greater wage dispersion will make it difficult for those at the lower end of the scale to live on one income. A typical CME is more likely to actively subsidize the modernized male breadwinner arrangement, as Germany did until fairly recently, making it affordable for a greater share of the population. The dual-earner/family-carer model combined with greater wage dispersion and low employment protection likely results in market-based care where quality is a function of purchasing power – creating socioeconomic inequality but reducing gender inequality in employment outcomes, at least for the groups able to pay for decent care. Where compressed or low wage levels and employment regulation make it difficult to purchase care on the market, as is more likely to be the case in a CME, low levels of state provision force most families to rely on grandparent care or to search for other informal care solutions.
The dual-earner/state-carer model, finally, would be hard to combine with an LME, given that it requires a strong, interventionist state and substantial tax revenues. This model facilitates women’s labor market participation, as can be seen in the Nordic countries, and has been argued to compensate for any tendency toward greater structural discrimination of women in CMEs (Englund, Ferrarini, and Korpi, 2010). It reduces socioeconomic inequality in the Nordic countries by offering the same affordable high-quality childcare for all and freeing all adults for participation on a labor market with relatively compressed wages, and consequently, women are able to achieve some level of economic independence from men. Nonetheless, women still tend to work part time (long part time at around 30 hours per week, but still less than men), and consistent with some of the predictions of the (gendered) varieties of capitalism literature regarding CMEs, they choose public sector jobs (created with the expansion of state services) with slightly lower pay than in the private sector, and in very small numbers are able to reach the highest career positions. Public childcare provision is important, but most care work is still carried out in the family, and it has remained disproportionally the responsibility of women. In a differently structured labor market, however, where in order to carry out the remaining care work, women would have to take insecure, “flexible” jobs, it would be even clearer that this model does not in fact produce a truly equal or equitable gendered division of labor.
Different combinations of labor market regulations, family policy, and state intervention can allow women a capacity to form and maintain autonomous households (Orloff, 1993), or their defamilialization (Lister, 1994), but with different consequences for different groups of women. It is notable that all models (sometimes implicitly) rely on women to reconcile earning and caring in the end, albeit in different ways, while men’s lives are assumed to remain largely focused on paid employment. When this is the case, gender equality is implicitly understood as the extent to which the lives of women can come to resemble those of men. The achievement of greater gender equality in paid employment may therefore come with a crisis of care (Hochschild, 1995).
In more recent years, a common objective in both the United States and European policies has been the labor market activation of (in the case of the United States, mostly poor) women and mothers – irrespective of caring responsibilities – by using carrots, sticks, or both. An important difference between the United States and Europe, however, is that European countries have been more preoccupied with below-replacement-level birthrates (with perhaps the exception of the United Kingdom; see Sigle-Rushton, 2008). In Southern, Central, and Eastern Europe, in particular, we find patterns of lowest-low fertility (defined as a total fertility rate of 1.5 or lower (Billari and Kohler, 2004)). Although all European countries have below-replacement-level birthrates, single-child families have become increasingly common, and in Southern Europe in particular, this coincides with low rates of female labor force participation – the worst of both worlds when viewed through the lens of demographic challenges to long-term welfare state sustainability. This is because low fertility and a shrinking tax base may exacerbate trends toward higher dependency ratios and the fiscal challenges to welfare state budgets that accompany them. In the next few decades, aging populations mean that most advanced welfare states will experience increasing demand for, and a reduced tax base available to fund, welfare state programs. This is one of the most important explanations for the recent trends in family policy logics at the EU level.
Since the early to mid-1990s, family policy logics in advanced welfare states, European nations in particular, have again become more similar. Rather than provide support for a dependent spouse and caregiver, family policies have developed, which attempt to encourage and facilitate mothers’ paid employment without obstructing the realization of their fertility ambitions. Rather than simply providing financial compensation for the costs of raising families, policy documents began to emphasize the need to address issues of parents’ (often mothers’) work–family reconciliation by providing job-protected time to care and childcare services, both of which are aimed at maximizing labor market participation rates (but not, as a general rule, at achieving gender parity in FTE rates). There is some consensus that meeting the challenges that accompany Europe’s changing demographic profile and its aging population requires policies that support both higher birthrates and female labor market participation – to the extent that the potential for men to fill care gaps has come onto the policy agenda. The EU has played an important role in these developments by setting out common social policy goals that countries are encouraged to promote. Of course, the outcome for gender as well as socioeconomic equality will depend on how any new policy approaches interact with the social and economic setting, previous policy logics, and deep-seated norms and values, as well as with the surrounding institutional setting such as the labor market structure and the family.
Although at the level of rhetoric, the previously rather distinct models of gender arrangements found in the policy documents and (to a slightly lesser extent) policy packages (Ferragina et al., 2013) of European countries appear increasingly blurred, most academic scholarship has continued to emphasize cross-national variations, often with reference to the policy logics that were adopted in earlier decades. There has been relatively less interest in documenting and explaining trends toward policy convergence, even those which involve substantial deviations from what expectations of path dependency would lead us to predict. In the following sections, we consider some of the most prominent trends toward convergence of policy logics and policy instruments, taking into account cross-national variations in approaches and likely outcomes.
Recent innovations in work–family reconciliation policies in EU countries have often been in the direction of convergence. Continental European countries, Germany in particular, have developed policies that moved in a Nordic direction, albeit in different ways, while Sweden has moved toward a more continental model. France was a forerunner in the development of policies that provide families with financial support for the costs of childcare without discriminating between different solutions. In what may be seen as a move toward encouraging female labor market participation over full-time informal childcare, France is now moving toward Nordic-style public childcare offering guaranteed institutionalized childcare from a young age (Morel, 2007; Lewis et al., 2008). In contrast, Germany, having relied heavily on the male breadwinner/female carer family for work–family reconciliation, has only just recently begun to reconsider the link between their historically strong institutional support for the male breadwinner/female carer division of labor and their low fertility rates (Streeck, 2009). Evidence suggests that the low German birthrate is driven by a clear divide between women who focus on paid work and have very low fertility and the (declining number of) women who forego paid work in order to specialize in childcare (Cooke, 2004). In response, a Nordic-style income-related parental leave insurance was recently implemented, with the hope of increasing fertility among middle-class women (Lewis et al., 2008; Streeck, 2009).
Sweden has a long tradition of promoting a dual-earner/state-carer model based on publicly subsidized and organized childcare combined with income-related parental leave. Recent reforms have, however, offered more ambiguous incentives framed as increasing parental choice in the organization of childcare and include a benefit paid to parents of children under three who are not enrolled in publicly financed childcare (Tunberger and Sigle-Rushton, 2011). The “cash-for-care” policy, which has been adopted by other Nordic countries as well, has been criticized as a “women’s trap,” especially for groups of women already poorly integrated into the labor market (Nyberg, 2010). But it has also been framed as a way of providing parents, and especially mothers, with a wider set of options, particularly in combination with an also recently implemented tax deduction for domestic services that can also be used to pay for home-based childcare. Even though institutional support for the dual earner/state carer remains strong at all income levels, the result may be a greater diversification of childcare arrangements according to socioeconomic status, the long-term consequences of which might mean a decline of political support for publicly financed childcare (if the wealthy increasingly opt out) and/or increasing social gradients in children’s developmental outcomes (if poorer women decide to look after their children at home and their children are denied the pedagogic stimulation of high-quality care) (Tunberger and Sigle-Rushton, 2011). In any case, these developments represent rather dramatic deviations from path dependency and toward a middle ground, one which supports a wider range of choices about how families organize their lives.
While this policy convergence indicates a wish to facilitate both women’s choice to enter the labor market, but still maintaining (or creating) a feasible choice to provide full-time care, whether there is a real choice will also depend on the structure of the labor market. Swedish wages do not normally allow families to live on one income, and the cash-for-care scheme is not generous enough to change that (Tunberger and Sigle-Rushton, 2011). The compressed wages furthermore make the possibility to purchase care on the private market difficult for all but high-income families. In countries such as Germany, where large groups of women have remained outside the labor market, the question is whether it pays for mothers to work once childcare costs and the remaining subsidies for single-earner families are considered – that is, whether mothers can find good enough jobs, especially when part-time work is desired, or whether these remain reserved for men and childless women (cf. Cooke, 2004, Sigle-Rushton and Waldfogel, 2007). Poor employment options may keep mothers who can afford to stay at home out of the labor market, and women who cannot afford to do so might instead choose to forego motherhood – which would further reduce birthrates. The ability to exercise choice is likely to be constrained by the socioeconomic context and labor market structure in important ways, and similar policies may well result in dissimilar outcomes. It is clear that different ways of balancing and distributing earning and caring, actively or passively, will have varying consequences for both socioeconomic and gender equality. But these cannot be understood without reference to the wider social and economic context. Examining policies, or even policy packages, in isolation could well be misleading.
The division of labor remains gendered all over Europe as well as the United States, but different arrangements of paid work and care shape women’s economic independence by conditioning the quantity and quality of women’s paid work relative to that of men. As policymakers have sought to address these issues, the behavior of men was rarely deemed problematic. Recognizing that this might be an important oversight, political philosopher Nancy Fraser (1994) proposed a model called the Universal Caregiver model, in which society would be organized around an individual resembling today’s woman – that is, one with both earning and caring responsibilities. The rhetoric of the Nordic countries and the EU comes closest to embracing this vision and aspiration, and there have been some modest efforts to develop policies to support and effect this sort of change, at least among fathers of young children.
While the US welfare state provides limited care services, effectively leaving it to women and the market (where other women make up the care labor), male caregiving is, to some extent, being encouraged at the EU level, possibly due to increasing evidence that it could help raise both the low European fertility rates and female labor market participation (Sigle-Rushton, Goisis, and Keizer, 2013). Indeed, a growing body of evidence, across a wide range of European countries, demonstrates that fathers’ share of care of the first child is positively associated with the likelihood of having a second child (Cooke, 2004, 2008; Duvander and Andersson, 2005; Esping-Andersen, 2007; and Duvander et al, 2010). The authors of these studies argue that an increase in fathers’ involvement in childcare works to reduce women’s opportunity costs of having children, facilitating their work–family reconciliation and thereby making them more inclined to have larger families. Increasing fathers’ involvement in childcare has been identified as a means of helping to increase fertility rates and women’s paid work; so European men are to an (albeit very limited) extent being asked to assume more responsibility, for childcare.
The most important EU intervention to encourage fathers’ caregiving was the 1996 parental leave Directive (96/34/EC), obliging all EU member states to create an individual right to leave for each parent for a minimum period of time that has recently been extended from 3 to 4 months, and 1 month has been made nontransferrable between the parents. As with all EU Directives, the legislation sets out a minimum level of requirements, but many aspects of the policy design, including the conditions of the leave, are left to each member state to decide as they transpose the directive into new or amended national law. This has resulted in a diversity of arrangements when it comes to both the flexibility of the leave and whether, and to what extent, it is paid. Sweden exemplifies a more generous parental leave consisting of 480 days out of which 390 days are paid at 80% of previous income up to a ceiling and the rest is paid at a flat statutory rate. Two months are reserved for each parent, and an equality bonus that increases the more equally the parental leave is allocated is meant to make up for the oft-cited economic loss related to fathers taking leave and encourage parents to share the leave (Nyberg, 2010; Tunberger and Sigle-Rushton, 2011). As we might expect from an LME, the United Kingdom exemplifies a minimal application of the directive, but there are nonetheless some signs of convergence toward a more European approach. Despite vehement opposition to efforts to introduce parental leave legislation at the EU level in the 1980s, the United Kingdom has, since the early 1990s, increasingly extended the length of both paid and unpaid maternity leave entitlements, while the United States continues to offer no statutory maternity leave at all. In contrast to other EU countries which have extended parental leaves, the United Kingdom has taken a more gendered approach and has one of the longest maternity leaves in the EU, while the gender-neutral parental leave entitlements remain more limited (Lewis and Campbell, 2007; Sigle-Rushton, Goisis, and Keizer, 2013). Only since 2011 has the United Kingdom provided the option of “additional paternity leave” of up to 26 weeks during the child’s first year. However, this conditioned upon the mother “returning” to work and so effectively relies on the mother’s eligibility for and her willingness to transfer any “additional maternity leave” to which she was previously entitled to her male partner.
The policy goal of increasing fathers’ caregiving is, at least in theory, shared by EU member states, but the policy commitment and the policy instruments used vary substantially. The extent to which policies have effected change in men’s behavior also varies to some extent. Despite some progress, Swedish men still only use a small share of the total parental leave entitlement, and outside the Nordic countries, fathers make even less use of their possibilities for leave. A partial explanation may be that even with generous legal entitlement, economic considerations (men tend to be higher earners) and strongly gendered norms both in the workplace and in the family make it difficult for some men to take (a large portion of) leave (Lammi-Tuskola, 2006).
Women’s time allocations vary to a much greater degree across countries, however, as depending on the demand for and availability of part-time employment, how much care work is assumed to be provided by the family in different contexts, and depending on how easy it is to outsource that care work to the market or other family members, the fact that men provide so little care work will have very different consequences for women and their ability to enter the paid labor market.
As part of the policy goal of increasing female labor market participation, countries that have traditionally offered social transfers to poor single mothers in order to allow them to specialize in full-time caring, including the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Netherlands, are reforming policy to instead make them enter paid employment. In the United States, the 1996 TANF reform made the eligibility requirements for social benefits (or “welfare”) stricter, pushing many poor single mothers into work (Martin and Caminada, 2011). Although more enabling and less coercive than US approaches (Korteweg, 2006; Gregg, Harkness and Smith 2009), both the Netherlands and the United Kingdom have implemented reforms with the similar aim of moving poor single mothers into paid employment and away from welfare state dependence; the UK Welfare Reform Act 2012 aims to further strengthen work incentives.
The effects of these reforms depend heavily on the kind of wages low-skilled single mothers can earn on the labor market and on the extent to which their wages or working hours constrain their ability to access affordable and good-quality childcare. While LMEs might offer more employment opportunities, the wages offered might be too low to lift families above the poverty line. The United Kingdom, even if usually classified as an LME when it comes to the labor market and welfare state organization, generously subsidizes low-wage earners in various ways, especially when they have dependent children and even when they work part time. This distinguishes the United Kingdom from the United States, where the low-wage labor market largely offers less-than-living wages, making single mothers risk having to take more than one job in order to make ends meet (Ehrenreich, 2001; Korteweg, 2003). At the same time, they have less access than their European counterparts to affordable and high-quality childcare, leading to some level of concern about the consequences the reform might have for the children. In a CME such as the Netherlands, on the other hand, the difficulty might not be so much the wages earned as finding work in the first place, but also challenging ambivalent, if not resistant, attitudes about working mothers (Knijn and van Wel, 2001). Again, therefore, we see that although policy logics and policy goals have been moving in the direction of convergence, the outcome is dependent on wider policy constellations and the socioeconomic context. In the future, some of the most perplexing and important questions about family policy will be less about cross-national variations in policy design (which often implicitly assumed a rather simplistic relationship between policy incentives and behavioral change) and more focused on explaining diverse outcomes in a context of convergence.
Having previously followed different models of organization of earning and caring, encouraging female labor market participation to very different extents, advanced welfare states have more recently started to pursue more similar policy goals of increasing women’s, and especially mothers’, labor market participation and, in Europe, simultaneously to increase, or at least sustain, birthrates. It is plausible that the convergence of policy goals is linked to the similar economic and demographic challenges facing advanced welfare states and to supranational institutions setting policy targets and providing institutional support for policy sharing. While there is still discernible variation in both goals and instruments across advanced welfare states, and countries across the EU still provide different family policy packages, there is also some evidence of increasing convergence.
In the past couple of decades, efforts to classify countries into different regimes or typologies have yielded important insights. The point of such efforts is simplification, allowing us to see patterns in the complexity of comparative public policy. We know, of course, that reality is more complex; countries belonging to the same regime are not identical and will not necessarily respond in the same manner to similar policy instruments. Surrounding institutional settings make up differing contexts within which policy is supposed to move us to “how we would like things to be.” Differences between countries following different models will likely be greater still. When classifications of countries integrate or are combined with analyses of how different models interact with related institutions, the usefulness of this analytical tool becomes evident. What we have seen in this chapter is that even if policy goals are similar, and in fact even when policy instruments are similar, outcomes may very well differ. Previous policy logics will be “sticky” to some extent, having created a society where the family is assumed to operate in a certain way, where men and women are supposed to take on certain roles, where earning and caring are assumed to be organized in a certain manner. Surrounding institutions, such as the labor market and the family, will have evolved in ways that inform and are informed by previous gender settlements and so shape the impact of subsequent policy innovations in important and complex ways. This underscores the need to examine family policies or policy packages not in isolation but as part of a wider policy constellation, which is modified by the wider social and economic context.
The outcome of the policy efforts to increase female labor market participation across the United States and Europe, and of work–family reconciliation across the EU, is therefore likely to vary in terms of gender equality but also of socioeconomic equality. While some systems are good at offering relatively equal living conditions among women, this has come at the price of very few women reaching the highest positions. Other countries seem better able to create gender equality among high earners – but at the price of greater inequality among women. This raises questions about whether economic equality among women is incompatible with economic equality between men and women: whether gender equality is incompatible with socioeconomic equality. One way or another, some form of gendered inequality seems unavoidable (cf. Rubery, 2009).
So how best to promote both gender equality and socioeconomic equality? Hakim (1995) argues that Nordic women have no choice but to work for pay, which might seem to explain the prevalence of the “choice” to combine paid work with mothering. What Hakim does not explain, however, is why Nordic women do not seem willing to forego children for their careers; pronatalist policies or not, it is arguably a free choice to have children. The relatively low fertility rates of the highly educated women in countries like the United Kingdom (Sigle-Rushton, 2008) or Germany also raise questions about whether systems that allow women to compete on men’s terms, and climb the career ladder to the same extent, are in fact characterized by gender equality among high earners or simply by some women choosing to live as men – that is, without caring responsibilities. Is a model in which men are able to combine top careers with family life while women often enough have to choose one that has really delivered gender equality? Where wage dispersion is greater, as in the United States, it is easier for high-income women to purchase full-time childcare and in that way live lives similar to men, but in other contexts, such a solution might not be economically feasible, and, in any case, the gender equality offered high-income women might not have much to offer other women. Moreover, the incompatibility of caring responsibilities with high-status labor market positions remains unresolved in such a model, with gender equality being equated to women being able to live like men simply underscoring the higher status awarded by society to a “male” lifestyle compared to a “female” one. The conclusion must be that there is no clear answer as to what model is best for women, or for promoting gender equality in families; women cannot be seen as a homogeneous group when discussing gendered consequences of public policy. Instead, different groups of women gain from different policy instruments, with consequences at both the individual and the societal levels.