Employment Statistics
Employment for both men and women has risen in the past few decades. Flexible working hours mean employees have the right to increase or decrease their hours without discrimination from employers. Overall employment rates in the Netherlands are 80% for men and 70% for women, respectively.
The culture of long working hours is relatively absent from the Netherlands. The average working week is only 39 hours, just below the European Union average. Working hours and flexibility are some of the motivators that influence the Dutch unemployment rate to just 2.7%, unparalleled by any other country.
Part-Time Work
A distinguishing feature of Dutch working culture is their emphasis on part-time work. They have managed to remove the stigma associated with such work by providing part-time workers with the same rights and benefits as full-time employees. 80% of women who occupy part-time jobs do it by choice and because they do not want full-time jobs rather than by financial pressures. The Dutch government has worked hard to ensure the continuance of part-time work by making three quarters of the two million jobs since 1983 part-time.
Unfortunately, part-time employment jobs do not facilitate career progress, and since most of these jobs go to women, the one and a half earner model of the Netherlands persists. The one and a half earner model has been referred to as the one and a quarter model because of the disproportionate working hours that women versus men occupy. On average women only work 69.7% of the hours per week that men do, increasing gender disparities.
Women's Employment
Women's employment rates drop after age 30, when men continue to work full-time, but women start to have children and consequently switch to part-time work. The dominant cause of unemployment for women is value associated with the care culture, or traditional gender roles for women and men.
Women's employment in the Netherlands has risen to 65%, greater than the average of OECD countries. Part-time work allows mothers to continue their careers, but still raise children by working around schooling hours. In fact, 86% of working women with a partner and young child now work part-time, more than anywhere else in the EU.
A negative effect of being a mother in the workplace is the so called "motherhood effect." This occurs in terms of pay, and research shows that while women make 90% of what men do when they are childless, this gap grows to 73% when children are included. Women are well-off in terms of their opportunities for employment, but still reinforce traditional norms.
Dutch family shopping in Stadshart. Zoetermeer, the Netherlands
References:
Cousins, Christine and Ning, Tang. 2005. "Working Time, Gender and Family: An East-West European Compaison." Gender,
Work and Organization 12(6):527-550.
Morgan, Kimberly J. 2006. Working Mothers and the Welfare State: Religion and the Politics of Work-Family Policies in Western
Europe and the United States. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. 2002. Babies and Bosses: Reconciling Work and Family Life: V. 1,
Austria, Denmark, and the Netherlands. OECD Publishing. (http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org)
Plantenga, janneke. 2002. "Combining Work and Care in the Polder Model: An Assessment of the Dutch
Part-time Strategy." Critical Social Policy 22(1):53-71.
Population Reference Bureau 2010. "Data by Geography>Netherlands>Summary." Washington D.C.:
Population Reference Bureau. Retrieved October 29, 2010.
(http://prb.org/Datafinder/Geography/Summary.aspx?region=194®ion_type=2)
