Dutch Women work less, have a big gender pay gap, and they love it

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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.

I'm an American who has lived in Holland for 8 years so maybe I can offer some perspective.<p>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".<p>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.<p>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.<p>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?

From the article:<p><i>"less than 10 percent of women [in the Netherlands] are employed full-time."</i><p>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.<p>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.<p><a href="http://statline.cbs.nl/StatWeb/dome/?LA=EN" rel="nofollow">http://statline.cbs.nl/StatWeb/dome/?LA=EN</a><p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistics_Netherlands" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistics_Netherlands</a>

I think this is just one example of the difference between European and American feminism.<p>Feminist movements in the USA, the country where “all men are created equal”, have been most successful where they fought for <i>formal equality between men and women</i>—antidiscrimination laws, getting more women into traditionally male professions, punishing sexual harrassment, and so forth.<p>In Europe, which has a much stronger culture of trade unionism, feminism has been more focused on <i>advancing the interests of women as a class</i> (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.<p>I’m not sure which of these approaches is <i>better</i> 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'.<p>Now, if only us men demanded the same ;).

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 <i>both</i> partners to work, but not full time.

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]).<p>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?<p>There are one or two good comments on this at Yglesias / Think Progress: <a href="http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2010/11/dutch-women-and-part-time-work/" rel="nofollow">http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2010/11/dutch-women-and-pa...</a><p>Now… if only I could persuade my girlfriend to stay in bed after 5:30 or come home before 20:00.<p>[1] <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1929618" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1929618</a>

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.

Is "less than 10 percent of women here are employed full-time" really that interesting?<p>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.<p>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?

Single page:<p><a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2274736/pagenum/all/" rel="nofollow">http://www.slate.com/id/2274736/pagenum/all/</a>

Financial independence is the <i>only</i> 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.<p>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.<p>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.

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.

You never should have the right to feel right if you aren't getting ahead! ;)<p>Strange, society tells us the way to go to feel right, but if we follow, nothing feels right.

"full-time" means spending your whole day earning money, just so you have no strength left to enjoy the "rest" of your day.<p>i find that crazy too.

That is also why the taxes are 52%. They have to nail everyone else who does work full time and earns a decent wage.