Squeezing in under the wire tonight. It’s been a long day of baby showering and pre-Thanksgiving Thanksgiving dinner, and I’m tired. And still rather sniffly.
But all of this focus on relationships this morning got me thinking about this article, posted by Megan some time last week. The title, “Women in the Netherlands work less, have lesser titles and a big gender pay gap, and they love it,” obviously serves the goal of attention drawing. I went to a feminist panel a few weeks ago in which one woman said, “We’re not looking for equality. We don’t want a piece of your moldy pie.” And ever since I lived in Spain, where the pace of life is slower, people seem generally happier and less stressed out, work less, party more (even old people, hitting bars and clubs at 3 in the morning) I’ve thought a lot about what it is we’re all fighting for here. Does success make people happy? Maybe. And I’m not using this as a copout for not fulfilling my potential or anything like that. I’m just thinking, in general, about why we work more for the right to work more. Until we’re able to retire. It’s sort of a strange system.
Plenty of questions come to mind right away about the article about Dutch women, fueled a bit by these statistics:
“Though the Netherlands is consistently ranked in the top five countries for women, less than 10 percent of women here are employed full-time.”
“Less than 4 percent of women wish they had more working hours or increased responsibility in the workplace, and most refuse extended hours even when the opportunity for advancement arises.”
and
“In the United States, the race for equality has gone mostly in one direction. Women want to shatter the glass ceiling, reach the top spots in the hierarchy, and earn the same respect and salaries as men do. But perhaps this situation is setting us up for a world in which none of us is having any fun.”
One could certainly ask why childraising, not childbearing, has been branded a female-specific activity, even in a country as progressive as the Netherlands. Or why American women have shifted their workloads outside the house without being able to bequeath any of the household duties to our partners. Or why the cost of childcare is so high (and, as a corollary, possibly why women’s work is valued so low?) in the Netherlands as to make staying at home a smart financial decision for the vast majority of Dutch couples. But still, ambition is perhaps the most American value, one we value highly and almost unequivocally. And yet here’s an article in an American online magazine making a point about work and values, looking (perhaps too dismissively) at an alternative that seems to be working somewhere not so, so different from where we live – and most people will skim it, or regard the system as blatantly sexist (which isn’t to say it’s not pushing some of the limits on contemporary concepts of equality). It’s not a coincidence that some of these concepts were brought up in the book Dutch Women Don’t Get Depressed – a parody of French Women Don’t Get Fat. It’s all kind of a laugh.
It’s times like these when I wish I was still in school so I could have intelligent conversations about topics like these without people acting like I’m Debbie Downer. But these are things I think about all of the time. There are options for looking at happiness and roles, who picks up the kids and who mows the lawn, differently. It’s just hard to know where to begin. Hard to learn to live with another person, let alone figure out how to work to each others’ strengths, regardless of sex.
Time to gear up for another work week. In some part of me, I’m envious of these women, working part-time or not at all, even as I don’t think replicating their lives is my own path to happiness or balance. We live in a strange and tangled world sometimes.
I like writing, photography, reading, music, design, typography, paper products, days in the seventies and sparkly snow, Spanish wine and cans of PBR. I spent a year in Córdoba, Spain, working as a 
What an interesting post. I have worked so hard to get to a place of professional *success* and a certain level of responsibility, but now that I’m here, I can’t remember why I needed to be here. It’s odd, really. I am slightly envious of other countries, such as your Netherlands example, but then I wonder if I’d be bored at all? It’s a internal discussion I have about staying home with kiddos or not (someday). But I think women have fought so hard for blanket equality that not enough time is taken to address individual’s happiness. Very thought provoking!
What a thoughtful, interesting post! I loved the line “But perhaps this situation is setting us up for a world in which none of us is having any fun” – at my previous corporate America job, this is exactly what my female co-workers & I would talk about…. it seemed frustrating to be working so hard in hopes to be promoted, when none of us thought our bosses’ jobs looked like anything we’d want!