What Women Want

Women usually want different things. Elizabeth Badinter’s Le conflit: la mère et la femme (“The conflict: motherhood and womanhood”) traces today’s women’s servitudes and dilemmas. In her book, she highlights the social pressure for mothers to breastfeed and the politics that have made this issue a priority worldwide without significant scientific evidence that breastfeeding is necessary. Badinter points out that in countries where water sanitation is problematic, breastfeeding makes a lot of sense. She asks however about the Western Woman, her aspirations to work and be Man’s equal and the consequences of breastfeeding policies and politics on women’s chances to reintegrate the workforce after having children. In a context where Europe’s welfare system is failing due to an ever decreasing birthrate and supports for parents that are quite arbitrary, what are decision-makers doing wrong? They just don’t know what women want.

Badinter draws on research to describe different types of women, which I can summarize as the following: 1) Those who have children; 2) Those who care about their career and for whom there is never a good time for having a child rationally speaking; and 3) Those who choose not to have children.

If our societies need to increase their birthrate in order to support tomorrow’s seniors, type 2 women are the ones policy-makers should start paying more attention to. Is it enough to give a 12-month maternity leave with 67% of your salary and a promise to retrieve the same position upon your return? It is certainly a pretty good deal but children don’t stop being children at the age of 9 months.  Often, in the time mothers took off from work, their male partners have continued progressing in their career and have further become the primary provider. There will also be at least another 15 years where parents need to spend extra-time with their offspring. A monthly check from the government does help for the years to come (until children-adults turn 26 in Germany for instance) but is it what women want?

A lot of educated women want to have it all: The great job, the great family and the sense of personal accomplishment. Isn’t that what women from past generations have been fighting for us to have? A lot of women have invested so much time and energy into a good degree and a good professional profile. Are they scared to loose it all by having children too quickly? Very probably, so they wait and they wait until their window of opportunity closes: the comfort of their professional and their personal life takes over the desire to procreate as Badinter describes.

What I’m going to suggest now links back to ideas that Jim Vaupel, head of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Studies shared with me in an interview last fall (see Schlossplatz3, p.21): more part-time work for both parents. Now this is what I call equality! Not a dad working full time and a mom working part time or not working at all, or vice versa. Governments and firms should work together to review competitiveness structures in the workplace to favor both parents in keeping a fulfilling career while taking care of their project of having a family. Badinter has however another suggestion: don’t feel bad for putting your children in day care or leave them with relatives from a very early age in order to continue working. Either way, it requires governments to invest in rethinking and financing families and infrastructures in smarter ways than a monthly check.

As I said in the beginning, women want different things: even if they would all classify as Type 2 women, governments might also want to think of providing a fluid system for supporting women to choose different possible paths for how they want to imagine their family lives and helping them making it possible.