The policies that give European parents generous leaves and free diapers also influence attitudes. DEC. 12, 2014 By Claire Cain Miller and Liz Alderman Raquell Heredia played with her one-year-old son, Giovanni, in Fontana, Calif., on Wednesday. Like many women, she is not working but wishes she were. Credit J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times “It is very intuitive that the fact that they provide more generous work-family policies and that they have been expanding these policies in recent years is one reason they have moved ahead of the U.S.,” Ms. Blau said. In the United States, Congress passed a law in 1993 giving certain employees 12 weeks of unpaid family leave. That was the last major piece of family-friendly federal legislation. But many European countries, which have long had paid parental leave, have expanded such policies since 1990. They have also expanded subsidized child care and passed laws giving workers the right to demand a part-time schedule and prohibiting employers from discriminating against part-time workers. These policies have been crucial for retaining mothers in the labor force. In a majority of countries in the eurozone, 20 to 40 percent of jobs held by women are part time, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. There is a flip side to these policies. Part-time jobs are often low-paid, with little opportunity for advancement. “From a gender-equality perspective, there are problems with this,” said Willem Ad By Claire Cain Miller and Liz Aldermanema, a senior economist in the O.E.C.D.s social policy division in Paris. “It’s a sign of relatively limited access to good-quality jobs.” The study by Ms. Blau and Mr. Kahn found that while men and women were equally likely to be managers in the United States, women were half as likely as men to be managers in Europe. The combined executive committees of the 40 biggest French blue-chip-listed companies have only 45 women. None of those companies have a female chief executive. “Upward mobility is still not equal today,” said Muriel Pénicaud, chairwoman and chief executive of the Invest in France Agency and a former executive at Danone, the French food giant. Daria Ostaptschuk had been in a diplomatic position with the O.E.C.D. in Paris when her child was born 10 years ago. When she returned to work part time, “my chances were not so good in advancing my career,” she said. “The trade-off is you are getting squeezed as a half-time worker, plus you don’t get the good jobs.” She now runs her own translation business. The wage gap between men and women has shrunk in the United States and in a number of European countries since the mid-1990s. But it hasn’t budged in France — and has grown in Italy and Portugal. Sometimes, cultural attitudes hold back working mothers. In Germany, labor market reforms in the 1990s led to more mothers entering the work force. But a cultural backlash rose in some corners against mothers who chose to spend time at work; a derogatory nickname — Rabenmutter, or “raven mothers” — was coined for those who pushed their children out of the house into day care. Policy makers and employers in Europe and the United States seem to be making a calculation: Either keep a growing share of women employed or allow them good jobs and promising career paths. Neither seems to have figured out how to consistently do both.
Posted on: Sun, 14 Dec 2014 01:29:49 +0000
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