WITH PRESSURES HIGH, SOUTH KOREAN WOMEN PUT OFF MARRIAGE AND CHILDBIRTH: Washington Post

feature:

SEOUL -- In a full-page newspaper advertisement headlined "I Am a Bad Woman," Hwang Myoung-eun explained the trauma of being a working mom in South Korea.

"I may be a good employee, but to my family I am a failure," wrote Hwang, a marketing executive and mother of a 6-year-old son. "In their eyes, I am a bad daughter-in-law, bad wife and bad mother."

The highly unusual ad gave voice to the resentment and repressed anger that are common to working women across South Korea.

In a country where people work more and sleep less than anywhere else in the developed world, women are often elbowed away from rewards in their professional lives. If they have a job, they make 38 percent less money than men, the largest gender gap in the developed world. If they become pregnant, they are pressured at work not to take legally guaranteed maternity leave.

Thanks to gender equality in education, the professional skills and career aspirations of women in South Korea have soared over the past two decades. But those gains are colliding with a corporate culture that often marginalizes mothers at the workplace -- or ejects them altogether.

Women who do combine work and family find themselves squeezed between too little time and too much guilt: for neglecting the education of children in a nation obsessed with education, for shirking family obligations as dictated by assertive mothers-in-law, and for failing to attend to the care and feeding of overworked and resentful husbands.

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Labels: children, gender differences, Marriage, South Korea, women, work/family policy

posted by Eve at 1:44 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

HARMAN VICTORY SEES FATHERS GET PATERNITY LEAVE SO MOTHERS CAN RETURN TO WORK: Telegraph (UK)

reports:

The father will be allowed to take time off work to replace the last three months of his partner's nine-month maternity leave.

He would be eligible during the three month period to statutory Government pay of £123 a week.

After nine months, fathers will even have the right the stay off work unpaid for another three months.

Ministers believe it will allow mothers who earn more than their partners to return earlier to work than has otherwise been possible.

Government data has shown that around 350,000 expectant mothers a year are at work. Around two thirds return to work.

It represents a victory for Harriet Harman, the Equalities Minister, who has championed the cause in a bitter Cabinet battle with Lord Mandelson who has fought for business to be spared the extra administrative and financial burden.

Under the current laws, fathers are allowed two weeks paternity leave when their child is born. That will continue, but after the mother has spent six months of leave she can then return to work and allow the father to take the remaining three month’s statutory paid leave and up to six months in total off work.

The new paternity changes will come into force in April next year and parents will be able to use the new transferable right to leave for children born after that date.

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Labels: Fathers, United Kingdom, work/family policy

posted by Eve at 10:10 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

IS FEMINISM THE NEW NATALISM?: Ross Douthat

replies to Michelle Goldberg:
...I'll be curious to hear what Goldberg has to say about the United States, because one could argue that the threat of population decline is also a reasonable argument for a more flexible, freewheeling labor market, and other dreamy American-style policies. That was one of the takeaways from Russell Shorto's big Times Magazine piece last year on fertility in the developed world, for instance. Like Goldberg, Shorto argued that the combination of a modern economy and a patriarchal social model leaves you with the worst of both worlds where fertility is concerned: Women are expected to be workers and full-time caregivers (to both children and to aging parents, in many cases), men aren't expected to pick up the slack, and so women end up too overwhelmed to contemplate having a second or a third kid, or even a first. But he also noted that while the Scandinavian combination of liberal social attitudes and generous day care and family-leave provisions produce higher birth rates than Spain and Italy, if you're really looking for replacement-level fertility, you need to turn to the United States:

"Europeans say to me, How does the U.S. do it in this day and age?" says Carl Haub of the Population Reference Bureau in Washington. According to Haub and others, there is no single explanation for the relatively high U.S. fertility rate. The old conservative argument -- that a traditional, working-husband-and-stay-at-home-wife family structure produces a healthy, growing population -- doesn't apply, either in the U.S. or anywhere else in the world today. Indeed, the societies most wedded to maintaining that traditional family structure seem to be those with the lowest birthrates. The antidote, in Western Europe, has been the welfare-state model, in which the state provides comprehensive support to couples that want to have children. But the U.S. runs counter to this. Some commentators explain its healthy birthrate in terms of the relatively conservative and religiously oriented nature of American society, which both encourages larger families. It's also true that mores have evolved in the U.S. to the point where not only is it socially acceptable for fathers to be active participants in raising children, but it's also often socially unacceptable for them to do otherwise.

But one other factor affecting the higher U.S. birthrate stands out in the minds of many observers. "There's much less flexibility in the European system," Haub says. "In Europe, both the society and the job market are more rigid." There may be little state subsidy for child care in the U.S., and there is certainly nothing like the warm governmental nest that Norway feathers for fledgling families, but the American system seems to make up for it in other ways. As Hans-Peter Kohler of the University of Pennsylvania writes: "In general, women are deterred from having children when the economic cost -- in the form of lower lifetime wages -- is too high. Compared to other high-income countries, this cost is diminished by an American labor market that allows more flexible work hours and makes it easier to leave and then re-enter the labor force." An American woman might choose to suspend her career for three or five years to raise a family, expecting to be able to resume working; that happens far less easily in Europe.

Incidentally, this is a point that the Willetts report (PDF) makes as well, though Goldberg doesn't mention it: The intersection of traditional gender roles and a modern economy may be driving down the birth rate in Italy, but that explanation doesn't hold up for Germany, where social attitudes are more liberal, and so Willetts spends a lot of time talking about ... the impact of Germany's labor market regulations on family formation.

In other words, saying that "feminism is the new natalism" doesn't necessarily mean that statism is the new natalism. If you're a "choice feminist," interested in maximizing female (and male, for that matter) freedom to choose to work or to choose not to, you may find more to like about the American way of parenting. (And you might be looking for reforms - like, ahem, a more pro-family tax structure - that would increase the flexibility that our model currently affords to parents.) If you're more of a Linda Hirshman-style feminist, on the other hand, you'll probably prefer the Scandinavian model, where after the guaranteed family leave runs its course, the socialized day care effectively incentivizes parents to get (back) to work whether they want to or not.

On the question of whether the latter model is really as empowering as its advocates assume, it's worth quoting Sandra Tsing Loh:

The debate about mothers and work: it always ends--doesn't it?--with Sweden. Oh, if America could only be like Sweden--such a humane society, with its free day care for working mothers and its government subsidies of up to $11,900 per child per year. The problem? One hates to be Mrs. Red-State Republican Bringdown, but yes ... the taxes. Currently, the top marginal income-tax rate in Sweden is nearly 60 percent (down from its peak in 1979 of 87 percent). Government spending amounts to more than half of Sweden's GDP ... On the upside, government spending creates jobs: from 1970 to 1990, a whopping 75 percent of Swedish jobs created were in the public sector ... providing social welfare services ... almost all of which were filled by women. Uh-oh. In short, as Gilbert points out, because of the 40 percent tax rate on her husband's job, a new mother may be forced to take that second, highly taxed job to supplement the family's finances; in other words, she leaves her toddlers behind from eight to five (in that convenient universal day care) so she can go take care of other people's toddlers or empty the bedpans of elderly strangers. (As Alan Wolfe has pointed out, "the Scandinavian welfare states which express so well a sense of obligation to distant strangers, are beginning to make it more difficult to express a sense of obligation to those with whom one shares family ties.")

That's from Tsing Loh's review of Neil Gilbert's fascinating A Mother's Work: How Feminism, the Market, and Policy Shape Family Life. If you're interested in this topic, you should read the whole thing, and the whole thing.
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Labels: demographics, Europe, tax policy, work/family policy

posted by Eve at 3:43 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Europe's Birth Strike: Michelle Goldberg

at TAPPED:

...Given this sort of rhetoric, it’s tempting to dismiss concerns about demographic decline as an anti-feminist race panic. The thing is, though, rapidly declining birth rates really are a problem, especially for the sort of generous welfare states that liberals love. I have a whole chapter about this in my new book about the global battle over reproductive rights, The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power and the Future of the World. The problem isn’t so much absolute population size as it is age structure – too few young people supporting too many old people.

While immigration is obviously part of the solution, immigration on the necessary scale is almost certain to produce serious nationalist backlashes. According to an article published a few years ago in the Journal of Population Research, if Italy’s 1995 fertility rate remained constant, then without immigration the country’s population size a century hence would be a mere 14 percent of what it is today. Even if Italy could smoothly adjust to a majority-immigrant society, will those immigrants really support a system in which a good part of their taxes go to maintaining a bunch of old Italians who they don’t necessarily feel any connection to?

I get why liberals have shied away from this discussion, since there’s so many uncomfortable issues involved. But they really shouldn’t, because the only solutions to the problem are liberal ones! Basically, the societies where birthrates have plunged to dangerous levels – Russia, Catholic countries like Poland, Spain and Italy, as well as Japan and Singapore – are all places that make it very difficult for women to combine work and family. In countries that support working mothers, like Sweden, Denmark, Norway and France, birthrates are basically fine – they’re either just at replacement, or shrinking in a very slow, totally manageable way. (The United States is the exception, for a whole host of reasons – some intuitive and some surprising – that I’ll elaborate some other time.) That’s why the Tory MP David Willetts, in a very smart 2003 report (PDF) on the threat low birthrates pose to Europe’s pension systems, wrote that “feminism is the new natalism.”

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Labels: demographics, Europe, work/family policy

posted by Eve at 3:37 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT