Do Dutch Women Work Enough?
Plus: a new terrorist threat in the Netherlands. Fun stuff at the end.
No other country in Europe has as many female part-time workers as the Netherlands. Seventy percent of Dutch women work part-time, a phenomenon so well-known that “part-time princesses” (deeltijdprinsesjes) was added to the Dutch dictionary in 2019.
For context: on average in the EU, twenty-eight percent of women and eight percent of men work part-time. (Twenty percent of Dutch men do).
This has been a hot topic for a long time, but the issue created an uproar again this month after the government launched a campaign encouraging women to work full-time. And this week, Statistics Netherlands released data showing that many women choose part-time work long before they have children: women who started their careers between 2007 and 2009 were twice as likely to work part-time a year after graduation than men, a difference that increased over time across every level of education.
How did it get this way? How did the Dutch labor market become so oriented towards such large majority of part-time working women, when other European countries did not?
Some history from the Volkskrant:
The Netherlands only recently started to focus on childcare, which was not promoted by the government until the 1990s. In the Netherlands we thought: part-time is the ideal way to allow women to work, albeit part of the time. Those choices from the past are clearly reflected in the present and that’s why we’ve come to regard the situation as it is as normal.
Researchers refer to the phenomena as the “part-time clamp” (deeltijdklem).
Due to the high-level of part-time work, especially by women, there is insufficient investment in public schemes to enable both partners to work full-time... the prevailing norm in the Netherlands is that women are primarily responsible for the care of children, parents and others, and that men are responsible for the income. Women are available at least part of the week for household chores and childcare.
Now to the uproar from this week!
One side of the debate: resentful full-time workers and those focused on the economy. Their sentiments were captured (controversially) by full-time female worker Japke-d Bouma in the NRC, where she listed things part-time workers say that she never wants to hear again.
Including: “There is more to life than work.”
Oh really? Working 3 days a week is 'more' than a full-time job? That sounds pretty arrogant. Oh by the way, what about your husband? Who pays your mortgage? Who is not entitled to “more in life?”
And: “I want to be there for the kids.”
Like I'm not a good mom because I work full time. Stop it.
This group argues that women need to get to work to save the economy and the pension system. Staff shortages in health care, hospitality, and education, not to mention long waits at Schiphol, could be resolved if everyone worked a little more.
Columnist Sander Schimmelpennick (who always says the most interesting and controversial things) sees inequality.
I think as men we should ask the question, is it fair that we as men bear the brunt of the public finances?
On the other side of the debate: people who see so much part-time work as a sign of progress. They argue that Dutch women only work part time because they can afford it. The Dutch have it made compared to places like Bulgaria or the US, with two and seventeen percent of part-time workers respectively - countries where most workers must work full-time to make ends meet. And you know all those studies showing how happy 4-day work weeks make employers and employees? Everyone wants to work less.
This side makes the most visceral argument, too: everyone should be spending more time with their children, the more the better. Men should work part-time: we need part-time princes.
I think there is something fundamentally cultural at the root of this debate. In reading online commentary about part-time work, I noticed a strong adherence to "maternity ideology," the belief that children benefit most from their mother's full-time care (the fatherhood ideology: the ideal father is one who earns enough money to support an entire family).
In the Netherlands, the idea of women working full-time seems to be… almost disgraceful? People comment that children households with two-time working parents will “grow up without a mother” or “only see their children on the weekends.”
This tweet in response to Bouma’s op-ed really stuck out to me as representative of a lot of comments I read in the newspapers and on Twitter. In sentiment, at least, if not in tone.
This seems to be a pretty mainstream Dutch way of thinking about work and parenthood.
It plays out in polls, too, like this one which shows that the vast majority of Dutch people believe that mothers and fathers should work less when they have children.
Note that so few people (one percent or less) think men alone should work less that it barely shows up on the chart.
It’s hard to imagine the vast majority of Americans and Bulgarians thinking his way; they have no choice but to work. And Swedes definitely don’t think this way:
Where the Dutch mother often has to answer for herself if she works full-time, the Swedish woman has to answer for herself if she does not. 'It is generally accepted that it is good for children to go to childcare, every study proves that. We won't go back to the past. This is simply better, and everyone in Sweden actually thinks so.'
So, Dutch society is ideologically oriented towards women working part-time, and the economic system reflects those beliefs. Or maybe it’s the other way around.
In any case, maybe they’re not part-time princesses after all.
A New Terrorist Threat
One hundred thousand people in the Netherlands believe that the country is “ruled by a small, evil elite who want to oppress, enslave, and even murder the population.”
This from the AVID, the Dutch General Intelligence and Security Service, 2022 annual report out this week, which included the term “Anti-Institutional Extremism” for the first time.
These extremists could become terrorists if radicalized. They frame things as though “that there is an enemy 'elite,' with which supporters are at 'war,'” a choice of words which can lead to violence, and already has lead to plots and intimidation.
Last December, three conspiracy theorists were tried for threatening bureaucrat Jaap van Dissel, and politicians Mark Rutte and Hugo de Jonge. In January, another was arrested outside the home of politician Sigrid Kaag, brandishing a torch.
The extremists believe that different groups are really in power, including Jewish people, pedophiles, big tech, or big pharma. Some want to form a “parallel society,” with their own schools and currency. Every European country has these kinds of social media-fueled conspiracy theorists.
But are where do the Dutch extremists come from, in particular?
In Trouw this week, expert Jelle van Buuren pointed to a conspiracy-theory consolidation during the pandemic. Protestors connected on social media and in-person at protests, their various theories coalescing around the idea of an evil agenda behind the government’s corona policy.
During the pandemic, there was too little room for critical voices or to deviate from government policy, Van Buuren believes. “As a result, we only heard the most critical voices, those of people who went off the rails with extreme conspiracy theories.” The lack of critical voices, and strict rules such as a curfew and the one and a half meter rule, have increased distrust and anger.
Conspiracy theories aside, there is some truth to the idea that Dutch government is shifting away from of the people.
Peter Omtzigt, an MP known as “The Terrier” for his relentless fraud investigations, wrote in the Volkskrant this week about the five ways he sees the Dutch constitutional system “cracking.”
First on his list:
Decisions are increasingly made in improper places, such as in meetings at the Catshuis [the Prime Minister’s residence], at climate advisory boards, or with lobbyists, but not in the Trêveszaal [where the Council of Ministers meets] or parliament. This threatens to push parliamentary control over decision-making into the background… the most important government decisions, such as the lockdown, curfew and school closures, have been taken in recent years in a body that does not exist at all according to the law, let alone be controlled by parliament.
These moves allow the government to “evade parliamentary scrutiny.”
Herein lies the essence of 'bad governance', namely that the country can be governed by regents, who can carry out particularly bad decisions without much resistance. After all, the essence of a democracy is that citizens and journalists can monitor decision-making so they can vote on that basis in elections. But in practice this hardly happens. In fact, it can happen the opposite way: the state increasingly controls the citizen. This leads to major problems, such as with the benefits scandal. But it also lays out the infrastructure with which a government or a state can control, command, and oppress the population.
Perhaps anti-institutional extremists tap - however incorrectly - into a real democratic slippage.
The extremists go wrong in all kinds of ways, significantly with the idea that the “evil elite” invent global events in order to further their goals. An overreach of decision-making at the Catshuis is so much more boring than believing that a ring of Santanic pedophiles operates out of a little Dutch village.
Wrong too (obviously) are extremist proposals to “fix” the problem by arresting, trying, and executing the elite.
Omtzigt, on other hand, proposes a democratic five-point plan (make decisions only in parliament, etc.) with a constitutional orientation, working with the system, rather than dismantling or exiting it.
AVID reports that anti-institutional extremists are likely here to stay. In part because there are always new issues in the news to latch onto - climate policies or geopolitical shifts - to fuel the fire and “prove” that the elite is running the show.
And because the more extremism there is, the more it is reinforced.
An increase in extremism on one side of the spectrum can lead to an extremist reaction on the other side. For example, the increased threat of violence from right-wing extremism in recent years was partly a reaction to the rise of ISIS at the time. And the hardening of right-wing extremism may cause hardening of left-wing extremists… The war in Ukraine caused gas to become scarce in Europe, contributing to a situation that gave post-coronavirus extremist, anti-institutional instigators another opportunity to continue spreading conspiracy theories about an “evil elite.”
🥳 Leuke Dingetjes
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I really appreciated this article! I’m a PhD educated scientist and science communicator in the US with 2 kids under 4 and our family is seriously considering moving to NL. I recently went from full time to part time because it would be less stressful for our family as a whole, I genuinely like my “stay at home mom days,” and we had the financial ability to make the choice. I’ve talked with Dutch colleagues about their perceptions of working motherhood and family life growing up, but anecdotes only reveal so much. Seeing cultural commentary and statistics collated here is really helping me see how things could be the same in some ways and different in others if we decide to make the move. Thanks!