In European societies there are some differences in the way and extent of women's integration into the labour market due to different economic development, political ideas and cultural traditions. In this paper two countries are compared, namely Finland and Germany, which differ considerably concerning women's employment patterns, employment prospects and their life orientations. While most Finnish women are participants of the labour force in full-time jobs, the working pattern of German women is of rather discountinous nature, depending on their chosen intimate relationships in private life, implicating their role as unpaid carers. As there is no sufficient provision of public care services, many German women are dependent on a male breadwinner while leaving their jobs for family purposes. In contrast, Finnish mothers return to their full-time jobs after maternity leave as the welfare state provides enough public care services for children and the dependent elderly. Thus it appears that Finnish women have gained financial autonomy and economic independence, a pre-requisite for living in democratic, individualized intimate relationships with equal decision power. Even if, during the last decades, empirical evidence has revealed the transformation of the well known breadwinner model to a modernized version, or partially a shift to an ‘adult worker model’, in Germany there is still no evidence for a general trend to a fully individualized life pattern of women with children.
1 Introduction
Among the striking societal changes in the last decades are the increasing citizenship rights and social rights for women, leading to a better but still not equal integration of women into the public sphere of European societies. Especially women's participation in the labour market is a relatively new phenomenon in the industrialized European countries (Pfau-Effinger 2000). Due to differences concerning economic development, political ideas and cultural traditions in the various European countries, women's integration into the labour market did not start at the same time and developed quite differently. Looking at Germany and Finland, we focus on two European countries which until today have differed considerably in the way and extent women are included into the labour market. While most Finnish women are participants of the labour force in full-time jobs, the working pattern of German women is of rather discontinuous nature, depending on their chosen intimate relationships in private life. Recently a lot of well-elaborated theoretical and empirical research has been completed, discovering the reasons for the different development of female labour market participation in Europe in general and in the two considered countries in particular. The most important influential factors are found to be different economic and historical developments, the impact of the welfare state regimes and the gendered cultural models and guiding principles (see Esping-Andersen 1990; Lewis and Ostner 1994; Sainsbury 1994, 1996; Pfau-Effinger 1999, 2000; Lewis 2001, 2002a; Gottschall and Pfau-Effinger 2002; Ostner 2002).
Until now current sociological investigation has paid but some attention to a more or less systematic consideration of an individual understanding of economic independence not only outside of, but also inside intimate relationships. However, it should be asked whether individual financial autonomy and economic independence have the same relevance and equal worthiness for women in the compared countries. Further, do the normative meaning and interpretations of economic independence depend on marital status or employment status of women? And, subsequently, what are the interdependencies between the desire for financial and economic autonomy, individual employment patterns and orientations and, furthermore life orientations altogether?
In this paper we discuss the subject of performing paid work and the disadvantages of women doing unpaid care work in the private sphere with a special focus on women's financial autonomy and economic independence from a male breadwinner. In a comparative perspective, but centred on the German experience, we look at the differences of women's labour market participation, their working patterns and the common explanations for the different developments in Germany and Finland. Yet, these arguments will be amplified by looking at the sociological discussion about the changes Reflexive Modernization has brought in the last decades, with key words such as individualization and pluralization of private ways of life (Beck 1986; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1995; Beck et al. 1996). We end with a vision of what working life could be in the future without neglecting other values of life.
Being well aware that the discussed subjects are matters of great complexity, this paper does not aim to give conclusive answers. It is rather intended to offer a set of reflections for taking up further discussion and to sketch a kind of country-specific understanding of economic independence of each individual in society.
1.1 Data on the differences in Germany and Finland
Like most Western European societies, Germany and Finland experienced a ‘leap in modernization’ (Beck 1986, ‘Modernisierungsschub’) in the last four decades. The steadily growing prosperity of economy and society after World War II led to increasing life perspectives for the individuals.2 At the same time, the second-wave feminist movement started striving for gender equality at all levels of society. The process of modernization in which German women increasingly turned to professional education and employment led to the development of a new female identity questioning their historical position as housewives dependent on a male breadwinner. The expansion of education was a milestone in that process and offered women a main prerequisite to participate in the labour market (Blossfeld 1985; Müller and Haun 1994).
However, the extent and way of female labour market participation differs considerably in Germany and Finland. In the beginning of the 1960s we can find substantial differences between both countries. At that time, only half of all women in Germany were employed, whereas in Finland about two-thirds of all women had a job. The gap between these two countries deepens if we consider the relationship between the labour force participation rate of men and women. The labour force participation rate of men in Finland was about 80 per cent at the beginning of the 1970s, while in Germany it was about 90 per cent decreasing to 80 per cent at the end of the 1990s. So, if the labour force participation rate of men and women is compared in each country, the gap between German men and women's participation rate is much wider than the one between Finnish men and women. Although in a long-term perspective the labour force participation rate of women rises and the rate of men decreases in both countries, the difference of levels between the countries remains.
1.2 Working Patterns of Women: full-time and part-time
The participation in the labour market can be specified by taking into consideration the working hours in gainful employment. Not only full-time but also part-time employment represents an option for participation in the labour market. Although the definition of part-time work differs widely from country to country, the OECD definition of part-time workers is based on an employment less than 30 hours per week (OECD 2000: 218). In Germany the proportion of women working in part-time increased from about 25 per cent at the beginning of the 1970s to approximately 33 per cent at the end of the last century.
In comparison to Germany part-time employment is less important in Finland: Since the end of the 1970s the proportion of women working part-time increased on a low level from about 10 to 13 per cent.3 This brings up the question as to which different circumstances generally lead to women's tendency to be employed as full-time employees or part time employees in the considered countries.
In almost all European societies the crucial event for women's employment pattern is childbirth (OECD 1994b). Germany is a representative of the ‘priority pattern’, according to which women interrupt their full-time employment to take care of their young children and return to the labour market after some years as part-time employees. A research project of the IAB4 in Germany for the years 1992–2000 shows that the most frequent employment status of women after maternity leave is part-time (Engelbrech and Jungkunst 2001). Especially women with two or more children work as part-timers. Limited access to childcare facilities is often responsible for an interruption of women's careers, although it is well known that a period of part-time work for family purposes often makes a transition back into full-time work very difficult and has negative effects on the career pattern (OECD 1994a: 84).
Empirical evidence of critical feminist researchers revealed that, after leaving employment for some years, many women are ascribed as being dequalified for their jobs and therefore their prospects on the labour market are disimproving. Because of the difficulties in becoming re-employed, many of these women turn to unpaid voluntary work for non-profit-organisations in the third sector, e.g., the churches, alternatively privately organized social acitivities (Notz 1994: 239). Notable, in the past each crisis of the German labour market has led to a public claim for the expansion of social voluntary work. Even if these claims were not specified in terms of gender, it is not hard to guess who is actually meant to be addressed. This can be seen as an attempt to exclude women with children who live with a breadwinner-partner from the labour market completely (Rudolph 2000, 2001).
In Finland, after child-birth and maternity leave, Finnish women stay in the labour market as full-time employees, whereas German women mostly tend either to work part time or retreat from the labour market completely, staying in economic dependence on a breadwinner. Even if one takes into consideration the differences between the compared countries, one thing is still obvious for both countries: as long as no child or children are living in the household, only few gendered differences in the employment patterns of men and women and their employment orientations can be observed.5 Striking differences between the two countries become visible concerning spouses with children and females as mothers or non-mothers: as in Germany, taking care of children and the elderly is professionalized to a much lower extent than in Finland, most of the care work is supposed to be done by women, who are working unpaid in the private sphere (Beck-Gernsheim 1993).6
2 Explanations of differences in women's employment patterns in Germany and Finland
Concerning the different developments in Finland and Germany, three main explanations have to be taken into account: economic and historical development, the impact of gendered welfare state regime with special social policies and the different gender and cultural models of the two countries (see, e.g., Pfau-Effinger 1999, 2000). Yet, the variables are interwoven in many ways: the historical political development and cultural norms produced the country-specific gender and cultural models which actually came to be established and supported by the welfare state regimes. This relation will be described briefly in the following section.
2.1 Historical explanations of the differences between Germany and Finland
In the pre-industrialized era, both countries had been based on an agrarian society structure. According to some authors (Scott and Tilly 1981; Frevert 1986; Häußermann and Siebel 1995), the family model and gender arrangements had then been nearly egalitarian, in spite of the existence of a gender-specific division of labour and the patriarchal structures of agrarian societies in general. Thus, in this interpretation the domains of both genders were given comparable social value and the work of each gained equal appreciation in society.7 The arrangements were based on a family economic model: husband and wife were dependent on each other for economic reasons.
In Finland in the late 1960s, the change from an agrarian society to an industrialized country took place quite late compared with other European societies. But the development was very swift and produced the welfare state simultaneously. Women became integrated into the labour market, as the conditions of the welfare state created jobs for women by providing the society members with public social services. Until today women represent the majority of full-time employees in the public sector (Kovalainen 2000: 137).
In Germany, the process of industrialization started nearly 100 years earlier and produced the Bourgeoisie as a new class. The male breadwinner emerged: men were expected to earn the family's income by working for a wage while their wives were responsible for private reproduction work. Due to the establishment of the Bourgeoisie and their increasing societal influence, the ideal female life-pattern developed more and more to a non-working mother staying at home to care for the children and the elderly.8 Women and men were supposed to be competent either for the public (males) or for the private sphere (females). The dominant cultural model in Germany since then has been – and partly still is – the married housewife, working and caring in the private sphere, unpaid and dependent on her husband. After World War II and the ‘leap in modernization’ in the late 1960s, when family patterns and employment orientations of women began to change, the cultural ideal slowly changed simultaneously into a modernized version: couples with children opt quite often for the so-called ‘Modernized Male Breadwinner Model’ (Pfau-Effinger 1999; Crompton 2002), that is the full-time/part-time combination.
Due to the process of individualization as one indicator of modernization going along with a change of normative patterns, mothers in intimate relationships became accepted as earning their own money and increasing their decision power in and outside their families and claiming their participation in the public sphere. Slowly they became socially entitled to work part-time while their children were at kindergarten or at school.
Besides these historical and cultural explanations for women's full or partial integration into the labour market, today there are more influential factors on women's employment decisions and life orientations in the two countries considered. A quite important one is the country-specific welfare state regime with its special social and financial policy strategies which will be discussed in the following section.
2.2 The impact of the welfare state policies on employment and life patterns
The different social and fiscal policy strategies are another explanation for the country-specific ways of women's integration into the labour market.9
In contrast to Finnish society, public child care provision as well as public care for the frail elderly is highly insufficient in Germany (e.g., Engelbrech and Jungkunst 2001). The financial policy rules for a family-model consisting of a male breadwinner with a non-employed wife provide incentives for women to stay at home as house-wives and unpaid carers: for that model the German state grants a tax deduction. It seems as it would be a relief for both the labour market and the welfare state if mothers either interrupt or leave their employment completely for care reasons. Furthermore, the German public social insurance system is tightly connected with the employment system and through old-age pensions it favours especially those family members who have continuously participated in the labour market. That again imposes another disadvantage upon women in Germany, leaving the labour market temporarily for family care reasons. In contrast, the regulations of the tax system and the social insurance system in Finland treat married women and men as individuals and not as couples as in Germany.
As a conclusion, the conditions in Finland result, to a great extent, in the financial independence of women, whereas the conditions in Germany can lead to female dependence on a male breadwinner and to economic instability throughout their life course. This problem is discussed in Germany especially in connection with female poverty in old age, which is mainly the result of the discontinuous employment history of women (see Allmendinger 1994; Ostner 1995). If women with children get divorced or separated from their husbands or partners, they have to bring up their children as lone mothers in most cases, many of them without an income of their own, financially supported by the divorced husband or the state without gaining sufficient claims for old age pensions.
Thus, the existence of a male breadwinner is quite often the reason for women with children to accept part-time working conditions. Moreover, to an increasing extent, women take up not only regular part-time work but precarious part-time work, which means a special German employment model freed completely from tax and social insurance contributions for employees. These patterns of non-standard working forms meet the demand for flexible work on both sides: employers as well as (female) employees. Most of those jobs do not require a higher qualification, they are mostly in the service sector enabling employers to manage peak times in their business at short notice. The negative result for women is that these low-paid jobs do not provide them with sufficient old-age pension claims at all.
2.3 Socio-cultural norms and the divison of paid and unpaid work
It is often observed that the life and employment pattern of German women is solely due to the institutional lack of public child-care services. But there are various influences on mothers’ employment decisions; the regulations of the welfare state policies, tax system and social insurance system as single variables exert their impact on female employment patterns only in relation to other policies and the respective cultural environment. The historically developed socio-cultural standards about the ‘adequate’ behaviour of women and men concerning their duties in a society in the public or private sphere still have much influence on life and employment orientations in modernized countries.10
As stated by Birgit Pfau-Effinger (1999, 2000), the various life-patterns and employment orientations lead to the theory of different gender and cultural models with their special employment patterns in the two countries considered: the male breadwinner/female part-time carer model in Germany, in contrast to the Finnish dual breadwinner/state carer model. In both countries these different gender/family models are supported and established by the welfare state systems; however, cause and effect cannot always be separated. Until today employment orientations of Finnish women, including Finnish mothers, are directed to full employment. One reason among other influential factors can be that Finnish industrial society was lacking something like the Bourgeoisie as a new influential class setting trends for new cultural family standards. The relatively late industrialization and the much earlier achievement of full formal citizenship rights for women in 1930 (Julkunen 2001), compared with Germany and some other European countries, might be additional explanations. Today Finland is one of the few European countries where full-time employment constitutes the norm for women as well as for men (Skard and Haavio-Manila 1988; Bergmann 1989: 91; Kovalainen 2000: 137). Besides the fact that Finnish household economics depend on two full salaries, it is socially acceptable for women with children to work full-time, and there are no moral objections against full-time working mothers as there are in Germany and in some other parts of Europe (Väisänen and Nätti 2001). Therefore, Finnish women have gained a stronger occupational identity as full-time workers in the labour market.
As already pointed out, the crucial difference between the countries is that, due to the public provision of care services in Finland, most of the necessary care work is organized and performed as paid work. German women with young children and/or dependent elderly are responsible for the same kind of work, to be done unpaid in the private sphere, including all disadvantages of economic dependence on a breadwinner. Taking into consideration the interdependencies between industrial development, economy and welfare state policies, the different cultural gender contract appears still to be a very strong influential factor for the unequal female labour market participation in the compared countries. Furthermore, these deeply rooted cultural norms seem to account for a country-specific view considering the social significance of both partners staying economically independent in intimate relationships. In the following section we will focus on financial autonomy in intimate relationships, discussing the question under what conditions ‘own money’ of women can lead to an ‘own life’.11 Even though in recent research this aspect has been sometimes considered, it should be brought once again to a careful attention as it is an interesting and important point for further discussions concerning the increase of individualized and pluralized private ways of life.
3 Own money – own life? On the way to modern individualized partnerships through employment?
As Meyer (1997) stated in a German–British comparison research project on the independence of women through the expansion of social care services, governmental policy can reduce economic dependence of women on their husbands. The possibility of earning one's own money is a key indicator for life quality. According to Meyer, every occupational activity apart from housewives’ unpaid duties includes the access to the public sphere in society and leads to more independence, autonomy and appreciation (Meyer 1997: 32).12
Looking at financial autonomy and economic independence of women in intimate relationships, Finland or the Scandinavian welfare states are special cases within the European context. Finnish women are quite independent financially, as the high percentage of their labour force participation in full-time jobs shows. Even if Finnish women become mothers, most of them return to their full-time jobs after maternity leave, which is about 11 months after childbirth. Thus, Finnish women remain economically autonomous even in the status of parenthood. Part-time work is characterized as a temporary or transitional state in the working career of men and women, because ‘Finnish women experience part-time work as partial dependency on men’ (Julkunen 2001: 8).
Professionalising care work to a great extent has led to women's integration into the labour market in Finland because women are performing care work as paid employees of the welfare state, whereas German women do the same work unpaid in the private sphere. A widespread net of Finnish care institutions is offered, women are able to work while their children and frail elderly are cared for by other women who are employees of the public care services. All those conditions can be described as part of a labour market-oriented society where every society member – men and women of employable age – has the prospect or is even liable to take up employment. Those working conditions support women to stay independent of a breadwinner and therefore can lead to a more democratic intimate relationship of two individuals with equal ranking.
But, after all, even Finnish women have not attained full equality, there is still gender inequality visible in lower wages and lower labour market positions although women's education is higher than men's. Moreover, there is a discussion in the Scandinavian welfare states that full employment of women can mean a partial dependence on the state (Bergmann 1989; Siim 1990). This dependence seems to be dual: first the dependence on the state as an employer of women due to the governmental welfare state policy and at the same time the dependence on the state in its role as a provider of public care services for children and the elderly. But, nevertheless, even if this kind of dependence is sometimes characterized as ‘public patriarchate’, it is not as humiliating as a dependence on a person going along with emotional and personal subordination (Bergmann 1989: 94–95).
Current debates in sociology about increasing individualization and pluralization of private ways of life in the last decades (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1995) assert that the model of a couple consisting of a male breadwinner with a non-employed dependent wife is increasingly losing its function.13 Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim describes the changing claim of females from an attitude ‘to be there for others’ into the right to live at least partly an ‘own life’ (Beck-Gernsheim 1983). Money of their own, it is said, enables women to increase their economic independence and can on the one hand facilitate them to end unhappy partnerships. On the other hand ‘own money’ might lead to more self-confidence of women and to the opportunity of living in a democratic individualized partnership model with equal decision power.14 Thus, financial autonomy is a precondition on the way to individualized intimate relationships of two individuals, who may share their living but at the same time are economically independent of one another.
According to recent sociological thought the ‘male breadwinner model’ is changing to an ‘adult worker model’ with both partners engaged in paid work (Lewis 2002b). However, this academic debate does not match with social reality in Middle and South European countries. Addressing the issue of gender equality, it seems that only the change of social policy in a welfare state could promote women's full participation in the labour market by providing sufficient public care services. As long as the subject of professionalizing childcare and care for the elderly to a sufficient extent is not put urgently on the agenda of social policy makers and not taken wholeheartedly into scientific theoretical discourses about individualization in the era of Reflexive Modernization (Beck 1986; Beck et al. 1996), the ‘adult worker model’ seems to refer solely to couples who don't have children and/or elder relatives who are in need of care.
But on the other hand, the final solution to the question of women's economic independence through labour market participation cannot culminate in entire ‘de-familialization’ of care work. Other individual and social values and preferences of families and mothers have to be taken into account. Jane Lewis states that it is highly unlikely that all care work can be commodified, as much care work is ‘passive’, requiring someone to ‘be there’ (Lewis 2002a: 347). Many mothers prefer to work part-time in order to ‘be there’ when their children return home from school as was revealed in recent German research about work-time preferences of mothers (Beckmann 2002).15
4 Summary
In this article, we point out that Finnish women participate in the labour market to a much higher extent than German women. Actually, their full integration into the sphere of paid work is – apart from the historical impacts – mainly due to the fact that in Finland care work is professionalized to a much higher extent than in Germany. The differences in historical development of the compared countries and political strategies in the welfare state systems have led to a discrepancy in financial and economic independence of women in the two countries. Whereas in Finland women and men are financially independent, although they live together as spouses with children, we find a special pattern in Germany: if a couple opts for parenthood, in most cases the partners will live a modernized version of the traditional normative pattern, where the income is obtained by the husband while the wife supplements the family income through her part-time wage.
Besides the well known explanations of historical development, the different gendered policy strategies and the gender cultural models, there is another important point causing the differences in women's labour market orientation and participation in the two countries: it seems that in Finland the social value of financial and economic independence of the individual has been integrated into the life pattern of spouses. Unintentionally, the development of the Scandinavian welfare states has led to a shift towards individualization and pluralization of life styles.16 In Germany, the modern normative concept of individual financial independence and the wish to have an individualized and democratic intimate relationship comes to a stop when spouses decide to become parents. Even if, during the last decades, empirical research revealed the decrease of the solely male breadwinner system and the changeover to a modernized version of a male breadwinner/female part-time carer model (Pfau-Effinger 1999; Pfau-Effinger 2000), or even a partial transformation to an ‘adult worker model’, in Germany there is still no evidence for a general trend to a fully individualized life pattern, with both partners in full-time employment and economically independent of one another. On the contrary: empirical evidence has shown that, in Western Germany, the traditional male breadwinner model is still relatively common (in more than 40 per cent of households), particularly when there are young children in the household.17 The highest female labour market participation was revealed for women who are 33 years of age, without children (88 per cent; German Mikrozensus 2002). Women in the so-called ‘active family-phase’, i.e., mothers to the age of 40, are still excluded from the labour market to large extent.
Anyhow, an equal individualized democratic intimate partnership could mean more – or might mean something else – than promoting the ‘adult worker model’ with both partners in full-time employment and an all-over supply with professionalized public care services provided by the welfare state. There could be alternatives like different concepts of family life and other models of employment patterns. It may look like an utopian vision to suggest, in that context, a reformation of the well-known pattern of gender-specific labour division. This long-overdue reformation could become real by dividing all sorts of work, paid or unpaid, equally between men and women. At any rate, this vision includes many challenges: new working time schedules and more flexible working models, as well as a reversal of the leading idea from all over Europe, that women are more competent for care work than men. And, after all, a change in the valuation of different kinds of work will be necessary. In the somewhat special Finnish case – and in Germany for the male employment pattern of fulltime-work – the socio-cultural challenge could be that working less hours would have to change to a more socially accepted working-time model. Recent empirical evidence already has shown a gap between individual preferences and the actual situation in Finland. Almost a third of full-time employees in Finland wish to work part-time (Väisänen and Nätti 2001). For both countries it can be said that there exists an urgent need for social acceptance of part-time work not only for females, but for men as well. Laying the fundaments for implementing new working patterns could be the challenge for innovative policy makers in the coming decades.
Not only feminist researchers, like Nancy Fraser, refer to the distribution of all kinds of work equally between males and females, Anthony Giddens, sociologist and adviser to Tony Blair in the British government, postulates that, due to the fundamental changes in the labour markets of all western industrial societies, the male working pattern in all probability will break down. Giddens argues that the arising questions are also changing. In future we shall have to face questions like: what will be the economic conditions leading to full employment? What circumstances in economy and society will guarantee full employment? And how shall we have to deal with the relationship between the value of work and other values of life? Until now work has been mainly defined from a specifically male viewpoint with the tendency to declare women as persons on the backstage who are preferably interested in emotions, caring and responsibilities for others, as the ‘experts of love’ (Giddens 1997: 239f.). If the male working pattern breaks down, it is time to think of new flexible working patterns for both men and women. Individuals in industrial societies will have to find a new balance between life and work. In that future model, men would be no longer excluded from important ‘private!’ life spheres, and all kinds of work would gain equal appreciation in society. Nancy Fraser puts it like that: women should no longer try to be like men, but the other way round: men should start at last to qualify themselves in female competences (Fraser 2001: 100).
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank participants of the 2001 conference of ESA in Helsinki for their very stimulating and useful comments. Particularly we are grateful for the data and information we got from Iiris Niemi from Statistics Finland about time use in Finland and from Mia Väisänen, University of Jyväskylä. We would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers of European Societies for their comments.
This paper is based on a presentation held on the European Sociological Association Conference in Helsinki 2001.
Ulrich Beck postulates a ‘lift-effect’: all members of the ‘class-society’ were lifted one floor higher while social inequalities still remained. According to Beck the leap in modernization led to a break-up of the former class-society (Beck 1986: 122).
Even if the extent of female part-timers is quite low compared with Germany and other European countries, it should be noticed that one-third of the female part-timers in Finland is working part-time involuntarily because no full-time work is available (Väisänen and Nätti 2001). Due to the economic recession in the 1990s with increasing unemployment rates, employers initiated more ‘flexible’ work (Julkunen and Nätti 1999). This might be an explanation for the high proportion of involuntary part-timers.
Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung der Bundesanstalt für Arbeit, Nürnberg.
We exclude the eastern part of Germany. According to the ideal patterns of labour market participation of men and women in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the fundamental changes after the reunification in 1990 the labour market situation was considerably different from West Germany (for further details see cf.: Beckmann and Engelbrech 1994; Braun 1994; Dölling 2000; Engelbrech and Jungkunst 2001; Pfau-Effinger and Geissler 2002).
The idea of being a ‘good’ mother staying at home to care for the children was discussed under a historical perspective by Yvonne Schütze (1991).
In the last decade, much elaborated theoretical and empirical research has taken place on the gendered welfare state regimes, social policies and tax systems and their impact on employment patterns. For reasons of space limitations we are not able to refer to all of them (see, for instance, Lewis 1992, 2000, 2001, 2002a; Lewis and Ostner 1994; Sainsbury 1994, 1996; Pfau-Effinger 1999, 2000; Dingeldey 2001; Ostner 2002).
According to the results of Irene Dingeldey's empirical research project, Esping-Andersen's calculation that in countries like Germany an increase of the supply of day-care would automatically increase gainful female employment (Esping-Andersen 1999: 59) cannot be taken for granted (Dingeldey 2001).
There have been broad academic discussions among feminist researchers about the meaning of the term autonomy and independence and it's contents (see Butler 1991, 2001; Benhabib and Butler 1993). It is not the aim of the paper to go deeper into the discussion of autonomy. We are referring to only one aspect in a matter of great complexity: it is the aspect of autonomy and independence in the financial and economic sense.
Meyer's statement that it is less important which kind of job someone has, as paid work automatically leads to more appreciation in society should be relativized by concerning the different valuation of work. Yet, if a society is willing to spend more money on public care services than another, it can be taken for granted that in a capitalistic society paid work and the persons who perform it are more appreciated than unpaid private carers. This aspect has some relevance in a micro-perspective as well: women performing paid work gain more appreciation in their private relations than women working unpaid in the private sphere. Apart from the already mentioned research, empirical evidence was found also in the Project B6 ‘Couples, Money and Individualization’, which is part of the Special Research Unit 536 ‘Reflexive Modernization’ at Munich University, funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft).
Some current research revealed that, despite visible changes, the traditional patterns still persist in mind. See, for example, the research of Liebold (2001): the results of her research in Germany from the perspective of male managers revealed that male managers discuss the reasons for their wives being employed as being independent of them, although the managers prefer the classic pattern.
Recent research by Christine Wimbauer (2003) focussed on the symbolic meaning of money in intimate relationships. She found empirical evidence for the fact that money and love should no longer be looked at as diametrically opposed, as money can serve not only as a medium of ‘Vergesellschaftung’, but also as a medium of ‘Vergemeinschaftung’ for both partners.
As far as we know there are no studies in Finland questioning the preference of women to care for their own children instead of performing care work professionalized in the public sector. But recent research has shown a tendency to a preference of part-time work (see Väisänen and Nätti 2001).
For further details, see the arguments brought forward by Häußermann and Siebel (1995: 128) for the Swedish model.
Findings of the project entitled ‘Tax and Social Security Systems and the Redistribution of Working Time’ funded by DG V of the European Commission and carried out in 1998 at the Institute Work and Technology in Gelsenkirchen, Germany under the direction of Steffen Lehndorff and Gerhard Bosch (see Dingeldey 2001).
Carmen Klement (Dipl. Soz.) studied sociology, with a minor in economics and law, at the University of Bremen and Helsinki. She works in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of the Forced Army and teaches methods of empirical research. Her primary research interests include social policy strategies in different welfare states, gender aspects of paid and unpaid work and sociology of professions. Publications include: Janowicz, C., Klement, C. & Mutz, G. (2000) ‘Corporate Volunteering als neue Form des bürgerschaftlichen Engagements in der Tätigkeitsgesellschaft, erschienen’. In: Berliner Debatte Initial, 11 Jahrgang 2000, Heft 4; Klement, C. (2001) ‘Der freie Markt und seine Grenzen-Aufstiegsweiterbildung in einem geschlechtshierarchisch strukturierten Arbeitsmarkt’. In: Born C. & Krüger, H. (eds), Individualisierung und Verflechtung. Weinheim: Juventa, pp. 139–58.
Brigitte Rudolph (Dipl. Soz.) studied sociology, psychology and intercultural communication. She is a research associate at the Institute of Sociology, Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich, working on the project B6 entitled ‘Couples, Money and Individualization’ which is part of the Special Research Unit 536 ‘Reflexive Modernization’ funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft). Her primary research interests include the future of work, gender, labour market and the third sector. Publications include: Eine Gesellschaft der pluralen Tätigkeiten – Chance oder Falle für Frauen? In: Ulrich Beck (ed.), Die Zukunft von Arbeit und Demokratie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2000); Mögliche Chancen und befürchtete Fallen der ‘Neuen Tätigkeitsgesellschaft’ für Frauen. In: Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte B 21/2001; Bürgerschaftliches Engagement im Wandel – Perspektiven für ein neues Geschlechtermodell? In: Feministische Studien, 21 May 2003.