Catherine Hakim argues that social and family policy should now be gender-neutral while catering for diversity in lifestyle preferences
SWEDEN is regularly held up as the model of best practice for gender equality in Europe. In reality, the rhetoric far outstrips the achievements of Swedish social engineering.
A woman I know was posted to Sweden to set up a subsidiary of her successful IT and systems design consultancy firm. In her first week, she was advised not to employ women and that this was especially important for a new company seeking to establish itself, where delivery of services to agreed timetables was vital. It was explained to her that investment in training new recruits, who were expected to be young, would be wasted, given women’s long absences on maternity leave in Sweden. Even when they returned to work, they had the right to work shorter hours and could take days off without warning in order to look after sick children. As a successful career consultant, she found she was employing men only, contrary to expectation. Sweden proves that social engineering extensions to basic sex equality laws are futile or perverse in their consequences.
In Sweden, three-quarters of working men are employed in the private sector and two-thirds of working women are employed in public services. This industrial segregation of the sexes is an important source of massive occupational segregation and a pay gap as large as anywhere in Europe – contrary to Swedish claims. A study by the International Labour Office shows that the Nordic countries have the highest degree of sex segregation in occupations among all Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries. The United States has the lowest level within the OECD group, but China has the lowest level in the world. Women are far more likely to reach top management in the US than in Sweden. The problem of the glass ceiling is greater in Sweden than in the US and seems to be a direct consequence of family-friendly policies. Countries with greater economic competition have lower pay gaps between men and women.
Sweden has applied gender equality policies for decades, with little impact on the sexual division of labour in the home and the workplace. Surveys show that virtually all Swedish women prefer not to share maternity leave with fathers. Ideologues made it compulsory. Now some fathers take extra days of baby-leave tagged on to holidays at Christmas and in August. The vast majority of parental leave is still taken by women, who undertake the vast majority of childcare.
If social engineering policies fail in a small, socially and ideologically homogeneous country such as Sweden, they are even less likely to succeed in large and culturally diverse societies such as Britain, where there is genuine debate about the appropriate goals of equal opportunities policies (to give them their correct name) and about possible roles for men and women.
Social policy and family policy should, in future, be gender-blind. A minimum amount of job-protected maternity leave is necessary for the health and wellbeing of mother and infant. Otherwise, all parental leave should be available to whichever parent chooses to take it, thus allowing role-reversal couples as well as women to be full-time parents if they so choose.
One example of gender-blind policies is the Belgian scheme for (paid) sabbatical leave for everyone – men and women – which can be used for childcare, further education or any other purpose. This
de-stigmatises parental leave and makes special leave available to others – the childfree as well as parents.
Gender-blind policies are seen as fair to everyone, but cannot produce equality of outcomes. They may increase differences between working men and women, because men often use such leave to update or extend their qualifications, or to start a business, while women generally use it for family work.
In the 20th century, equality legislation was essential to eliminate entrenched sexism in the workplace, trade unions and the wider economy. Anti-discrimination legislation remains essential to ensure equal opportunities for all social groups in a meritocratic society. However, some feminists insist that the policy goal should instead be equality of outcomes, which requires vigorous social engineering to force everyone into the same roles. This could not succeed. Nowadays, people regard themselves as free to choose their lifestyle and personal goals.
Sociologist Anthony Giddens argues that choice is now forced on people in post-modern societies. In the absence of any single model of the good life, people are forced to choose their values and lifestyles. Choice becomes increasingly important in the large, multi-ethnic and multi-cultural countries of the European Union and North America, where there will never be unanimity on social and political goals. In Europe, the important dividing lines have moved away from gender and class towards different lifestyle preferences, so public policy should support freedom to choose your own lifestyle.
Research evidence for modern economies over the past 30 years shows polarisation in women’s employment patterns and in family lifestyles. When there is freedom to choose, women and men divide into three lifestyle preference groups: home-centred, work-centred and a large middle group of adaptives who seek to combine paid work and family life in some fashion. Proportions vary between countries, but the three groups are identifiable across the globe, in former Soviet bloc countries as well as capitalist economies, in Japan as well as Sweden.
The three groups have different values and competing interests, which bring them into conflict with each other, especially as regards social policy priorities. The most misleading feminist myth is that women are united in their goals and priorities. For example, almost one-quarter of women (and men) now remain childless, mostly by choice, and their priorities differ significantly from those of parents.
The feminist myth that all or most women would be just as careerist as men, if only they were given the opportunity, has been exploded. Across western Europe, work-centred women account for only one-quarter or less of women. Even in Sweden, only a one-third minority of women are careerist in their employment patterns.
The trend towards flexibility in the workforce has also shown that some occupations and jobs cannot be made family-friendly. Even where they can be transformed, the dedicated careerist working a 60-80 hour week will generally have an advantage over the worker who seeks a good work-life balance and does not give priority to job demands over private life. The labour market rewards competitive values more often than the caring and sharing values which dominate private life. I predict that men will continue to dominate in the workforce and public life, while women will continue to dominate in family life – even in the absence of sex discrimination – because there are some residual differences in tastes, values and lifestyle choices that have a cumulative impact.
Equal opportunities policies have been successful, stimulating massive changes over the past 30 years and transforming women’s lives. Social policy should now be gender-blind, so men and women can choose to focus on family work or paid jobs. Women already have this choice. Men do not; work-centred lives are still imposed on them. Perhaps equality legislation should address this unfairness instead of always focusing on women. Perhaps race equality should now take top priority.
Catherine Hakim is a sociologist at the London School of Economics and has written extensively on women’s employment and social policy
