Freedom of Choice through the Promotion of
Gender Equalityspol_687 666..680
Steven Saxonberg
Abstract
This article argues that policies that promote gender equality actually also increase freedom of
choice. Thus, despite the neo-liberal criticism that welfare policies limit choices and privatization
and market solutions increase freedom of choice, this article concludes that market-liberal welfare
regimes offer less choice than the Nordic type of social-democratic welfare regimes, which have
openly striven to promote gender equality. They do so by making it easier for mothers to choose to
work (by making day care available and making it easier for fathers to stay at home with children)
and by giving fathers the ability to choose to spend more time with children. However, within the
realm of such policies, it is still possible to offer more or less freedom of choice, for example, by
making parental leaves either extremely flexible or rigid in how they are utilized. Interestingly, it
turns out that, in the real world, policies that promote gender equality even offer greater freedom of
choice for the group of women considered to be ‘family oriented’ as well as for lesbian and
homosexual couples.
Keywords
Gender; Family policy; Freedom of choice
Introduction
In recent years, the issue of ‘freedom of choice’ has become increasingly
prevalent in the debates on public policy in general and welfare policy in
particular. Although it originally grew out of the neo-liberal discourse on the
need for privatization and retrenchment, even more social liberal and social
democratically oriented theorists began claiming that a process of individualization
has been taking place, in which preferences for career, lifestyle and
caring choices have become more pluralized (Beck 1992, 2001; Giddens 1991).
Both our wants and needs have become more diversified as we have moved
away from the assembly line towards jobs that allow for greater work-time
Address for correspondence: Steven Saxonberg, Department of Social Policy and Social Work, Faculty
of Social Studies, Masaryk University, Jostova 10, 602 00 Brno, Czech Republic. Email: sax@post.utfors.se
Social Policy & Administration issn 0144–5596
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9515.2009.00687.x
Vol. 43, No. 6, December 2009, pp. 666–679
© 2009 The Author(s)
Journal Compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ , UK and
350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
flexibility, working partially or fully at home, the possibility to work part-time,
etc. Thus, they claim traditional standardized welfare policies cannot meet the
needs of citizens as well as in the past.
This article focuses on family policy because, as feminist theorists have
noted, no policies have greater influence over gender roles than family policies
(i.e. Lewis 1993; Sainsbury 1994), which in turn means that family policies
influence almost every aspect of our daily lives, from the manner in which we
relate to our romantic partners, to our ability to have careers and compete on
the job market and the way we raise our children.
Family policy also presents an interesting case because some basic aspects
of it, such as parental-leave insurance, cannot emerge from a free market, but
rather by their nature require state intervention. Private insurance providers
would not be able to make a profit without any state support or regulation, as
they would expect their clients to have children and thus demand payment
rather early in their adult lives after only paying insurance premiums for a few
years. Then the clients would discontinue their membership in the insurance
scheme almost immediately after having the number of children that they
want. Thus no long buffer period exists for most adults in which they might be
expected to pay insurance fees without demanding any benefits in return.
Family policies also bring up the long-standing debate on positive and
negative freedom in a rather special light. Free-market supporters using the
notion of negative freedom would claim that the way to maximize choice in
society is to let markets take care of everything, while social democrats and
social liberals can argue perhaps more clearly than in many other cases that
considerable conflict exists between what choices the market provides and
what choices could be available if the state were to pursue policies that increase
our freedom of choice. For example, in the United States it is common to ask
mothers whether they breastfeed their infants, while in Europe it is obvious that
the mother breastfeeds the child unless health reasons prevent it. This difference
does not arise because American mothers have different preferences than
European mothers – American mothers are just as aware that it is healthier for
the infant to get milk from the mother than from baby formulas – rather, the
difference is that in almost all European countries paid maternity and parental
leaves exist that allow mothers to stay at home for usually at least half a year,
while American mothers did not even get the right to a short three-month
unpaid leave until the courts ruled in the 1990s that mothers were entitled to
a ‘sick leave’, because they were not physically capable of working after having
a child. Many mothers cannot afford this unpaid leave and others are afraid
that taking even this short leave would gravely affect their careers. Another
striking example is the case of a female doctoral student in the United States,
who told me that she had recently become pregnant and when her adviser
found out he tried to persuade her to get an abortion, otherwise she would lose
her scholarship! In European countries, by contrast, mothers have the right to
return to their jobs after going on maternity leave, even if they are doctoral
students at a university. So here differences in family policy can literally
become a question of life itself!
The main argument of this article is that family policies which promote gender
equality also increase freedom of choice more than either laissez-faire liberal or conservative
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policies. They do so by increasing the amount of available choices to both the
mothers and fathers by making it easier for women to choose to have careers
while still having children and by making it easier for men to choose to spend
time with their children. Even women who are not interested in having a
career have a greater number of options available under social democratic
regime-types that promote gender equality than under the liberal or conservative
alternatives, as such policies still make it easier for them to choose to
have children given the economic constraints that make it difficult for most
families to live on one income. In fact, given the budget constraints that exist,
then social democratic policies that aim to promote gender equality have in
practice been more generous even towards women who would prefer to stay
at home with their children full-time and not work at all. However, I will also
argue that the question is more complicated than simply whether policies
promote gender equality or not, because even among policies that promote
gender equality, one can develop policies that are more flexible and give more
freedom of choice, or policies that are less flexible and give less freedom of
choice, in the sense of giving more or less option of how parents can divide
their time between work and family.
Despite these rather straightforward arguments, two factors complicate the
analysis of freedom of choice, although, if one includes these elements in the
analysis, they strengthen the argument that measures which promote gender
equality increase freedom of choice. First, a possible conflict can arise between
long-term and short-term freedom of choice. In some cases, policies that place
some limits on freedom of choice in the short run (such as reserving parental
leave months only for the father even if he would ‘prefer’ to work) can actually
increase freedom of choice in the long run. Second, if one takes into account
structural factors, such as cultural norms that might, for example, prevent
men from making the choices that they would have made without these
constraints, then policies that reserve parental leave months only for fathers
could actually increase freedom of choice also by fighting against structural
factors and making men realize more clearly what they would ‘really’ want to
choose if they had not felt constrained by these cultural norms.
I break this article down into five sections: (1) maternity leave policies; (2)
paternity leave policies; (3) the flexibility of parental leaves; (4) day-care
policies; and (5) policies towards non-nuclear families. It should also be noted
that most of the Scandinavian examples will concentrate on Sweden, because
as Sainsbury (1999) shows, its policies go farther in promoting gender equality
than Denmark, Norway or Finland, while most of the examples of conservative
policies will be based on Germany, both because that country has often
been considered the ideal-typical conservative welfare state and because its
recent moves towards the Swedish model help indicate the problems that the
conservative model faces today.
Maternity Leaves
Hakim (2000) built upon the individualization hypothesis to develop her
preference theory, in which she basically argues that family policies can have
only very limited influence on behaviour, because women in post-industrial
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societies have developed different preferences. One group of women is
‘career-oriented’, and will always want to work regardless of policies; a second
group is ‘family-oriented’, and will always want to give priority to having a
family over working regardless of policies. Consequently, only the third group
of ‘adaptable’ women will adapt their choices to changes in family policies.
A problem with this line of reasoning is that Hakim herself considers the
group of adaptable women to be the largest (representing about 60 per cent of
all women), which implies that policies in fact will have impact on choices.
Another problem with Hakim’s argument is that she claims that gender
equality is not possible because while women have different preferences,
virtually all men have the same preference for placing their careers over their
families. As a result, policies cannot influence men to share in raising children.
Rather than investigate this hypothesis empirically by using survey data as she
does for women, she merely assumes this to be the case. She also refers to
Sweden as proof that policies promoting gender equality cannot induce men
to change their behaviour to stay at home with their children. This is also a
rather strange conclusion, given the fact that the percentage of parental leave
time in that country has been progressively increasing over the last two
decades and has now surpassed the 20 per cent level (SCB 2008).
Despite the drawbacks of Hakim’s arguments, what is interesting for
present purposes is that if it is true that women have preferences in line with
what Hakim writes, then policies promoting gender equality would still actually
provide more freedom of choice than traditional liberal or conservative
policies. For the career-oriented group, generous social democratic policies
that encourage fathers to stay at home and give easy access to quality day care
allow career-oriented women the choice of having children without having to
give up their careers. If the father of the children stays at home most of the
time during the first year or years and then the children attend day care, then
women who do not want to give up successful careers for their families would
no longer be required to do so.
Meanwhile, for the largest group, comprising adaptable women who are
interested in both working and having families, policies that encourage fathers
to stay at home for a while, provide easy access to day care and also provide
generous leave provisions for mothers for their period at home also make it
much easier for these adaptable women to balance work and family life. While
conservative policies that support the male-breadwinner model might force
these women against their will to become housewives and completely give up
their careers, and liberal, laissez-faire policies might make it difficult for these
women to spend any time at all at home with their children, the Scandinavian
types of policies that promote gender equality allow the adaptable women to
stay at home for a while and receive generous leave payments (80 per cent of
previous salary in Sweden, for example), but also make it easier for them to
return to their jobs since they are guaranteed the right to come back to the
same job and position if they return within one and a half years.
The most ambivalent case concerns Hakim’s family-oriented group. One
could argue that conservative policies that promote motherhood and induce
mothers to become housewives would be the preferred policy for this group.
Regardless of whether that would be true, social democratic policies that
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promote gender equality still provide the family-oriented group with more
choice than the liberal, laissez-faire model. In a purely liberal model mothers
do not receive any paid parental leave at all, so family-oriented women might
find that even if they want to stay at home, they cannot afford to do so; in
some cases, they might decide they cannot afford to have children at all. It is
worth noting that the International Social Survey Programme survey on the
family shows that, among European countries, the Netherlands was the only
country in which fewer than 70 per cent of the female respondents believed
that women need to work to support their families.1
In the market-liberal USA
the total was over 86 per cent. Thus, even women who have family-oriented
values often find that they must work, so social democratic policies that make
it easier for them to balance work and family life will make it easier for women
to have children than under the liberal model, since they will at least get some
paid leave time to stay at home and then will still be able to utilize cheap
public childcare services when they feel that they must return to work for
economic reasons.
Of course, even if family-oriented women have greater freedom of choice
under the gender equality model than the liberal one, they still might prefer a
purely conservative model that would enable them to be completely financially
independent from the labour market, so that they could become housewives,
while the Nordic model only makes it easy for women to stay at home
for a couple of years. For example, in Sweden parents receive 13 months of
insurance-based leave at 80 per cent of their salaries, with two months
reserved solely for the mother and two solely for the father, but in practice
parents often stay at home for a longer period by utilizing less than 100 per
cent of the daily payment. For example, they can choose to stay at home twice
as long for a total of 26 months and receive 50 per cent of the benefits per day
(which amounts to 40 per cent of their salary). Some strains of feminism argue
against the abolition of gender roles and instead claim that women should be
the main carers, but they should be given a ‘normal’ salary for caring, so that
they can become economically independent from their husbands. According
to this view, the problem is not that women have different roles from men but
rather it is that women’s roles are undervalued.2
One obvious problem with the argument in favour of this type of ‘maternal
feminism’ is that it would be extremely expensive. If the government were to
provide mothers with a monthly salary equal to the country’s average salary
for their entire adult life or even ‘only’ for the 18-year period in which they
take care of a child, the costs would be so high that they would become
prohibitive, especially if one takes into account the government’s loss of tax
revenues from women who decide to stay at home rather than pursue careers.
In practice, conservative governments have not ‘succeeded’ in inducing
women to stay at home for longer periods with their children because their
policies are not generous enough to give women the choice of staying at home;
in fact they normally do not give more money for parental leaves than social
democratic countries. Rather, they induce mothers to stay at home for longer
periods with their children by denying the choice of returning earlier to work by
limiting access to day care and discouraging fathers from sharing in the
parental leaves. Thus, in Germany, before its recent reforms, mothers
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received a generous maternity leave at 100 per cent of their previous salary,
but that is only slightly more generous than the 90 per cent that Sweden used
to give before its economic crisis in the early 1990s and still not much more
than the 80 per cent that Sweden offers today. Although 80 per cent is
somewhat less generous than 100 per cent, as already noted, in Sweden
mothers can receive this high level of payment for 11 months. In contrast, in
the old German model mothers only received this high amount for 14 weeks,
which were followed by a means-tested child-raising leave (Erziehungsurlaub)
that paid a low, flat-rate benefit (OECD 2007). Since very few nurseries
existed for children under three and many kindergartens were not open
full-time (Deutsches Jugendinstitut 2008: 46), mothers often felt forced to stay
at home with their children until they began school. Under such conditions,
one would expect the career-oriented and adaptive women either to give up
their career ambitions or their motherhood ambitions, but the question is
whether this large group of around 80 per cent of the population would really
be giving up its freedom of choice for the small group of 20 per cent who are
family-oriented. If that were the case, then at least one group could benefit
from conservative policies. But as already noted, even many family-oriented
women feel that they must work to survive economically, so the conservative
model that is based on taking away the choice of balancing work and family also
takes away the possibility for many family-oriented women to choose to have
children.
Since the conservative model in practice eliminates the choice for many
women to balance both work and family, the only realistic choice for many
women is to give up their dreams of motherhood. The resulting drop in
fertility has been so great that many continental countries have been abandoning
the conservative family policy model and have moved closer to the
Scandinavian direction. Thus, in Germany, the Christian Democratic Chancellor
(together with her party comrade who was minister of family affairs)
pushed through a reform that eliminated the child-raising leave and replaced
it with a one-year parental leave insurance. In addition, it provides for a
two-month bonus if the father goes on leave for at least two months. The
government has also committed itself to radically building up access to day
care for children under three.3
It seems that traditional, conservative, malebreadwinner
policies have not been able to meet the needs of either familyoriented
women or family-oriented policy-makers.
Parental Leave Policies: The Fathers
So far the argument has been that the Scandinavian types of parental leave
policies that aim to promote gender equality actually provide more freedom of
choice for all three of Hakim’s groups of women than liberal or conservative
policies, but what about men? Hakim just assumes that all men have the same
preferences for careers over families without empirically investigating this
issue. Yet, if it is true that our attitudes are becoming more pluralized as we
move from an industrial to a post-industrial society, from modern to postmodern
views and we are becoming more individualized, then why would we
expect all men to have the exact same preferences about parenthood? MoreSocial
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over, in contrast to Hakim’s claims, policies do seem to influence male behaviour,
as in Sweden men now account for over 20 per cent of the parental-leave
time.
The question is, from the view of freedom of choice: should we be satisfied
with economic incentives such as a parental leave system that provides a high
level of benefits, so that families would not lose much money if the fathers stay
at home even though fathers usually earn more money than mothers? In both
Norway and Sweden policy-makers concluded that providing economic
incentives was not enough, so they introduced a ‘daddy month’ in the 1990s,
which reserved one of the parental leave months solely for the father. Iceland
went so far as to reserve one-third of the leave time for fathers, while the
Swedish government eventually added a second daddy month.
From the freedom-of-choice perspective, reserving months for fathers
might seem an infringement, because it limits the ability of men to choose to
continue working and have the mother stay at home, but the issue is more
complicated than that for several reasons. First, even assuming that daddy
months might limit the freedom of choice for some men, they could also at the
same time increase the freedom of choice for women, since women have the
possibility of returning to their jobs more quickly if the fathers of their children
share in the parental leave time. Second, the tricky issue arises of children.
Technically, infants cannot reasonably ‘choose’ whether or not they want
their fathers to spend time at home with them, as they are too young to even
comprehend the word ‘choice’. For this reason, in the Swedish discourse the
term ‘right’ is often used instead. For example, one government report proclaims:
‘The child has a right to early and close contact with both parents’
(Batljan et al. 2004: 17, my translation). Despite the usage of the term ‘rights’,
the logic of such arguments implies that if infants were capable of making
choices, they would choose to exercise their rights to have a father home with
them.
These examples show that when it comes to freedom of choice, when the
father chooses whether or not to stay at home with his children, he is also
directly influencing the freedom of choice of the mother and indirectly influencing
the presumed freedom of choice of the children. Yet, even leaving out
these matters, the father’s choice is a rather complicated issue. Feminists and
Marxists have traditionally criticized the liberal view of free choice, because
liberalism assumes that society is nothing but a collection of free individuals
and thus ignores the structural restraints imposed by underlying power structures.
These structures can hinder our choice even if we are aware of our own
best interests, but they can also influence our preferences by giving us some
kind of ‘false consciousness’. Thus, Lukes (1974) develops the notion of ‘real
interests’ which he defines as the interests that we would really have if our thoughts were
not manipulated by ruling power structures that in turn influence the mass media, our culture
and our cultural institutions such as schools. This view implies that, deep down, we
as individuals have interests that might differ from our conscious preferences,
since our preferences have been manipulated so much by socialization processes
and the mass media that we think we have a certain preference (such as
men thinking that they should only work and never take care of children)
although we might actually prefer an alternative if we were aware of our ‘real
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interests’ (so these same men might find that they would actually prefer to
spend time with their children if they had freed themselves from their manipulated
socialization and actually spent time at home with their children). Of
course, the notion of real interests in practice is very problematical, because
the issue then arises of just who defines real interests. This leads to risks of
authoritarianism as a small elite (such at the ‘workers’ vanguard’ in communist
dictatorships) decides it knows what is really in everyone’s interests. This
is such a complicated issue that it cannot be developed further here, but for
present purposes it is enough to point out that ‘preferences’ as usually defined
are also problematical, since many men might actual ‘prefer’ to spend time at
home with their children if they actually had the experience of doing it (for
example, by being pressured into it via daddy months), but given the cultural
constraints and socialization processes that they went through, they are not
aware (‘conscious’) that they would actually enjoy being at home with their
children.
Even if we could agree on an exact definition of what men’s real interests
were and that they have real interests in spending time at home with their
children, and even if some men became aware of these real interests, that in
itself still might not necessarily increase the freedom of choice for all these
men. Keeping in mind the starting point of a patriarchal power structure, then
even men who are aware of their ‘real interests’ might still be afraid to ask
their employer’s permission for going on parental leave. They know that while
employers expect women to eventually go on maternity leave, they do not
expect men to take paternity leave. Consequently, requests to go on paternity
leave can easily induce a negative reaction from an employer who disapproves
of the employee’s ‘lack of ambition’. Although no scientific studies, to my
knowledge, have directly addressed just this problem, studies on workplace
culture in Sweden show a correlation between workplace culture and the
willingness of men to take paternity leaves (i.e. Haas et al. 2002).
Given these structural hindrances, ‘daddy months’ can actually increase
the freedom of choice for many men, as the designation of several months
only for the father gives men a stronger bargaining position vis-à-vis their
employers. Rather than having to defend their ‘lack of ambition’, fathers
can now claim that their family cannot afford to lose several months of leave
benefits. Consequently, at least some men find themselves in the ironical
position of being forced to do what they really wanted to do anyway, but
did not dare to do.
In Sweden some authors try to get around the choice issue altogether by
pointing out that all other social insurances in the country are individually
based and their benefits cannot be handed over to anyone else, so parental
leaves should not be an exception (see the discussions in Lorentzi 2004 and
Bergqvist 2008). Each parent should have a set amount of months and they
cannot give away these months to anyone else, just as they cannot give away
pensions or unemployment insurance to anyone else. Thus, leaves would be
shared equally in every family. For example, in Sweden in every family each
mother would have six and a half months’ leave and each father would have
the same leave, and neither parent would be able to decrease the leave time
by giving away some time to the other parent.
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If we are to take the notion of individuation and postmodern values seriously,
however, then it is questionable whether we really want to force the
same solution upon every family. No two people have the exact same preferences
and needs, so why should everyone be forced to behave in the same way
and divide their parental leaves exactly equally? From a feminist perspective,
would it really be a problem if, for example, a career-oriented woman had a
child with a family-oriented man and they decided that the man should stay
at home for most of the leave period so that the mother could pursue her
career? If we were to create a non-patriarchal society that no longer forced us
into gender roles that prescribe for us how we must behave regardless of our
own wants and needs, then why should we assume that everyone would
suddenly have the exact same wants and needs? Perhaps, then, the goal of
gender equality should not be to make all people exactly equal in their choices,
but rather it should be to eliminate the correlation between gender and
behaviour.
Even if one accepts this goal, the question is how to get there. Surely, the
fastest way to get fathers to share equally in the parental leave time on average
is to force them to divide the leave time equally in each case. In the short term
parents would lose some freedom of choice, as family-oriented mothers (and
perhaps a few family-oriented fathers) would spend less time at home than
they would prefer, while some career-oriented fathers (and in some cases also
mothers) would spend more time at home than they would prefer. In the long
run, however, freedom of choice would increase, as attitudes would start
changing and men learn to share in the childrearing and even like it. Once
new cultural values become firmly entrenched and employers get used to the
fact that on average fathers will go on parental leave for just as long as women,
then eventually complete freedom of choice could be reintroduced in the
model, as both men and women would be more likely to act in accordance
with their ‘true’ preferences without fear of being punished by their employers,
employees or looked down upon by friends, family and neighbours for not
being ‘good mothers’ if they let the fathers stay at home with the children, etc.
For many families, however, the short-term sacrifice in terms of loss of
freedom of choice will not be outweighed by the long-term gains to society.
We can expect many cases to arise in which families would lose a lot by such
a reform, which perhaps is one reason why no government has dared to go so
far. Instead, the Icelandic model seems to represent the most politically
feasible compromise, where one-third of the leave time is reserved for each
parent while the remaining third can be divided according to each family’s
choice.
Parental Leave Policies and Flexibility
Even if policies that promote gender equality generally seem to increase
freedom of choice, such policies can still be formulated in ways that provide
more or less freedom of choice by being more or less flexible.
At one extreme, it would be possible to have a parental leave that is open
to both parents, but only allows one parent to use it and no possibility exists
of staying at home for a longer period and receiving less money per month. At
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the other extreme, parents could be free to divide their time between themselves
as they would like and they can decide to stretch out the leave as long
as they like by receiving a lower benefit per month but for more months.
The previous German system approximated to the inflexible model. When
the Christian Democratic-liberal coalition government introduced a meanstested,
flat-rate childcaring leave after the maternity leave ended, it only
allowed mothers to go on this leave. After a man complained to the European
Court, the government decided to allow fathers to take this leave as well.
However, until 1992 only one parent could take this leave. According to the
new law parents could alternate the leave three times, but only one parent
could go on leave for a particular period (Rosenkranz et al. 1998: 9). A later law
further limited it, so that parents could only divide their stays at home to two
periods (Bundesministerium für Familie, Senioren, Frauen und Jugend 2004).
Sweden represents the other extreme, where although some months are
reserved for mothers and fathers, parents can choose to divide the remaining
months in any way they please, including staying at home during the same
period of time but during different days of the week. In addition, parents are
free to stretch out the leave as long as they want, so they can, for example,
receive half as much payment per month but for twice as many months. In
contrast to the previous German system in which parents had to announce
how they would divide the parental leave time from the beginning, in the
Scandinavian countries parents can also decide at any point in time to change
the length of their leave, so a father receiving 25 per cent of the leave money
for two months could decide in the third month to receive 100 per cent of it,
and then he could decide to return to work in the fifth month and let the
mother take care of the child, etc.
Childcare Facilities
Easy and affordable access to high-quality childcare facilities also improves
freedom of choice for parents. If they can afford to send their children to
day-care centres and if they feel confident that these centres are of high
quality, then their chance of returning to work at an earlier stage increases. If
access to childcare is combined with generous parental leaves, so that the loss
of income from staying at home does not matter much, and the cost of sending
children to day care is not high enough to give parents a disincentive to return
to work, then parents can make their decisions about how fast to return to
work based solely on their own preferences for what is best for their careers,
their children and their desire to spend time with their children. Such policies
also promote gender equality given the unequal starting point in which the
mother is the most likely one to be at home with the children if day care
options are not available.
Market liberals might protest that state support for childcare distorts
markets and takes away parents’ freedom of choice, since the state is likely to
favour public day-care centres over private alternatives. Even if this were true,
a completely private system strongly restricts freedom of choice for many
parents, who cannot afford to pay the high price of day care. For example, a
recent survey of childcare in Great Britain complained about ‘the shockingly
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high costs of childcare in Britain’ and noted that many parents have trouble
paying for it.4
In America, even the middle class generally finds day care
prohibitively expensive. Consequently, rather than send their children to
nursery schools with trained personnel, many hire unqualified people, who
often are immigrants (including illegal aliens), who do not have any pedagogical
training.5
The question arises as to why one is more ‘free’ when one feels
forced to hire an unqualified, illegal immigrant, but one is less ‘free’ when one
sends one’s child to a publicly funded day-care centre, run by universityeducated
preschool teachers! Even more importantly, why is a mother more
free when she feels forced to stay at home although she would like to return to
work, but cannot afford day care, but unfree when she is able to decide herself
when to return to work, because the childcare facilities are easily affordable?
Nevertheless, market-liberals may have a point that freedom of choice
could be improved in countries where public day-care facilities dominate the
market. As long as all alternatives remain affordable, it is not clear that they
must all be public alternatives. It would be possible to increase freedom of
choice by allowing publicly funded private childcare facilities to compete
freely with private ones. This would not represent a large deviation from the
social democratic model if the private facilities were to be basically publicly
financed and had to follow the same rules as public ones concerning fees.
Then they would remain affordable and would be forced to compete based
on alternative pedagogical philosophies rather than based on being able to
provide higher-quality services by charging higher fees.
Alternative Living Styles
So far, I have argued that generous public policies that promote gender
equality also promote freedom of choice. Generous parental leave schemes
and easy, affordable access to day care obviously also benefit the freedom of
choice for single parents (usually mothers) who can both afford to stay at home
more easily and are able to return to work more quickly. Such arrangements
should also help homosexual couples with children, although certain provisions
should be made to allow the non-biological parent to stay at home with
a child and receive parental leave benefits if the child is adopted or if the child
was born via artificial insemination (in the case of lesbian mothers). When a
heterosexual relationship leads to a child and the parents then break up and
the mother then enters a lesbian relationship, it still might be good for the
child and the father if the father shares in the parental leave time, so in that
case it would not matter afterwards whether the mother enters into a homosexual
or heterosexual relationship after they break up.
In theory, we would not necessarily expect social democratic countries to
be any more tolerant of alternative lifestyles than liberal countries. If we take
the free-market economist Milton Friedman’s (1980) title to his famous book
(co-authored with his wife Rose) at face value, ‘free to choose’ implies that
under a market-liberal regime, the state should stay out of private matters and
let people decide themselves how they want to live. Thus, the liberal state
should be completely neutral concerning one’s choice of lifestyle. In practice,
however, countries with social democratic traditions are much more tolerant
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of alternative lifestyles than countries with liberal traditions, even if liberal
countries tend to be more tolerant than conservative ones. Whether the issue
is the right to legal abortions (and state-funded ones), the ability to achieve
easy, no-fault divorces, the right to same-sex marriage, the right for homosexual
couples to adopt children, the ability for couples living together to
enjoy the same rights as married couples, etc., the social democratic Scandinavian
countries generally have come the farthest in granting freedom of
choice. For example, Denmark allows same-sex marriages, while the Swedish
government has recently proposed such a law and Sweden also allows homosexual
couples to adopt children.
Conclusion
This article argues that family policies that promote gender equality as
practised in Scandinavia (and especially in Sweden) have also tended to give
greater freedom of choice than either liberal or conservative types of policies,
by providing greater possibilities to decide how long people want to work or
stay at home with their children.
Generous parental leaves make it easier for mothers to decide to stay at
home for longer periods than under liberal regimes, while affordable access to
day care makes it easier for women to return to work after a shorter period
than under conservative regimes. Meanwhile, by providing insurance-based
parental leaves that minimize the loss of income when one goes on leave,
social democratic types of welfare regimes have also made it easier for fathers
to choose to stay at home, since families do not lose much money even if the
father earns more money than the mother (which in most families is the case).
Even within the confines of generous parental leave schemes and generous
funding of childcare facilities, it is possible to increase the freedom of choice
or decrease it. For example, the Swedish parental leave scheme allows for
maximum flexibility in that parents can divide the leave time as they like by,
for example, deciding to have one parent at home two days a week and the
other at home three days a week or by taking a longer leave but receiving a
smaller benefit payment per month.
The issue of months reserved for the father brings up an interesting
dilemma concerning freedom of choice. In some cases daddy months can
actually ‘force’ the father to do what he would really want to choose, but
previously did not dare to choose out of fear of how his employer and work
colleagues might react. Furthermore, when fathers are induced to stay at
home for longer periods, this can influence the freedom of choice for mothers
to return to work earlier and also give children the ‘right’ to have more time
with their fathers, which they presumably would ‘choose’ to do if they were
old enough to make choices.
When it comes to childcare facilities, generous public support increases the
freedom of choice of parents by allowing them to decide themselves when they
want to return to work. However, the generous public support does not
necessarily have to go solely to public childcare facilities. Public support can
just as well go to private or cooperative facilities as long as these alternative
facilities are forced to have the same pricing model as the public facilities to
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insure that good-quality care remains available to all regardless of income.
Instead, policies should be geared to allowing competition among competing
pedagogical concepts of what kinds of activities the children should engage in,
which gives parents greater freedom of choice in deciding what kind of day
care they would choose for their children.
Finally, if we take the concept of freedom of choice seriously, then we
should also have maximum freedom to choose our lifestyles. This includes
whether to live together or get married; whether to have homosexual or
heterosexual relationships (and marriages); whether to live with a partner or
alone; whether to raise our children with the other parent or alone; whether
to stay married or get divorced; whether to have a child or choose to have
an abortion, etc. Even though, in principle, countries with liberal traditions
should support maximum choice in these areas, in practice social democratic
Scandinavian countries have been much more tolerant than the liberal,
Anglo-Saxon countries.
Acknowledgements
The research for this article was financed by grants from the Baltic Sea
Foundation in Sweden for the project ‘Family Policies in Post-communist
Europe: Influence from the Swedish or German Model?’ and from the Czech
Grant Agency for the project ‘The Revenge of History? An Examination
of the Historical Roots of Childcare, Healthcare and Elderly Care Policies
in the Czech Republic’, grant number GA403/09/1182; and Grant no.
IAA700280901 from the Czech Academy of Science Grant Agency.
Notes
1. Unfortunately, this question was asked in the 1994 survey but not repeated in the
2002 survey. Nevertheless, no reason exists to assume that the results would change
much if the question had been asked in the 2002 survey, since, for example, the
percentage of women thinking that women should contribute to the family income
increased for most European countries (i.e. Saxonberg and Sirovátka 2006).
2. Heitlinger (1993) calls this ‘maternal feminism’.
3. For the recent German reforms, see Bundesregierung (2007).
4. The quote comes from Daycare Trust (2008: 4), but the problem of affordability is
discussed throughout the report.
5. See, for example, Esping-Andersen (1999: 57, fn. 7), who admits that Americans
usually use ‘cheap informal care from unlicensed women’, but he makes no
mention of the usage of immigrants and illegal aliens.
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