Working mothers are a majority now in Europe. That may be progress, but it is not necessarily a promotion because very few of those women are professionally successful, despite social policies that favour families with children. French women are certainly the envy of the whole world (daycares, state subsidies, generous maternity leave…), but the wage gap between men and women still averages about 27 per cent. The time that the poor merdeuf spends with her kids, making meals, vacuuming, and telling silly stories, is time she does not spend at work. According to one economist, women who have to take care of children earn some €100,000 to €150,000 euros ($150,000 to $225,000) less than they could have, averaged out over their whole careers.
And while 80 per cent are working, only 30 per cent ever make it into important positions – a little better than in Germany and especially Italy, but not as good as in the U.K. Do you know many female CEOs, press barons, members of parliament? The famous glass ceiling stops women from getting the top jobs, and those jobs do have one great advantage: the higher you rise, the fewer idiots there are above you. It is not astonishing that biographies of successful women never fail to note the number of children they’ve had: those are obstacles they’ve had to overcome in order to make something interesting out of their lives. It’s a bit like running a marathon with a five-kilogram weight (per child) on each foot.
Furthermore, motherhood is often the equivalent of a part time job that offers no prospects and no hope of promotion: 31 per cent of today’s women work part time. Of those who are working, many have few qualifications and are in the lower-echelon service industries, the public sector, or, at best, the education system. A lot of underpaid jobs do allow time for one’s parental duties. For women the implicit deal is this: “The job is not great, but you have time to look after your children, so what are you complaining about?” As for the less qualified, generous financial assistance has clearly persuaded them to quit the labour market.
And don’t talk to me about these “new fathers” who get a lot more involved in the home than previous male generations did. True, they know how to change a diaper and bottle-feed the baby. But that doesn’t mean that they sacrifice their careers. The proof: when men become fathers, their professional activities increase and they devote more time to their jobs – the opposite of women. Studies show that men who have brilliant careers are often the fathers of families loaded with children, while the most successful women are often childless. There is no doubt about it: children are an accelerator for the one, a millstone for the other. In the Zapatero government of Spain at the start of 2007, there were eight men and eight women; the former had twenty-four children among them, the latter only five. (Relax, reader: this is not a math problem for schoolchildren.) You want gender equality? Start by not having children.