December 29, 2010
Working (Part-Time) in the 21st Century, NY Times
By KATRIN BENNHOLD

UTRECHT, NETHERLANDS — Remco Vermaire is ambitious and, at 37, the youngest partner in his law firm. His banker clients expect him on call constantly — except on Fridays, when he looks after his two children.

Fourteen of the 33 lawyers in Mr. Vermaire’s firm work part time, as do many of their high-powered spouses. Some clients work part time, too.

“Working four days a week is now the rule rather than the exception among my friends,” said Mr. Vermaire, the first man in his firm to take a “daddy day” in 2006. Within a year, all the other male lawyers with small children had followed suit.

For reasons that blend tradition and modernity, three in four working Dutch women work part time. Female-dominated sectors like health and education operate almost entirely on job-sharing as even childless women and mothers of grown children trade income for time off. That has exacted an enduring price on women’s financial independence.

But in just a few years, part-time work has ceased being the prerogative of woman with little career ambition, and become a powerful tool to attract and retain talent — male and female — in a competitive Dutch labor market.

Indeed, for a growing group of younger professionals, the appetite for a shorter, a more flexible workweek appears to be spreading, with implications for everything from gender identity to rush-hour traffic.

There are part-time surgeons, part-time managers and part-time engineers. From Microsoft to the Dutch Economics Ministry, offices have moved into “flex-buildings,” where the number of work spaces are far fewer than the staff who come and go on schedules tailored around their needs.

The Dutch culture of part-time work provides an advance peek at the challenges — and potential solutions — that other nations will face as well in an era of a rapidly changing work force.

“Our part-time experience has taught us that you can organize work in a rhythm other than nine-to-five,” said Pia Dijkstra, a member of Parliament and well-known former news anchor who led a task force on how to encourage women to work more. “The next generation,” she added, is “turning our part-time culture from a weakness into a strength.”

On average, men still increase their hours when they have children. But with one in three men now either working part time or squeezing a full-time job into four days, the “daddy day” has become part of Dutch vocabulary.

“From our conservative Dutch philosophy about motherhood comes this urgent wish to spend more time with the family,” said Karien van Gennip, a former trade minister who runs private banking and investment at ING.

Ms. Van Gennip has felt the change, and its almost accidental nature, firsthand. In 2004, to fierce criticism from Dutch media, she was the first cabinet member pregnant in office. In 2011, her bank is phasing in the second stage of replacing employees’ personal computers with laptops fully equipped for remote work.

“For a long time our part-time culture looked backwards,” she said. “Now that is changing because it has taken us closer to what everybody is looking for: work-life balance.”

Wouter Bos, a former finance minister and now four-day-a-week partner at the accounting firm KPMG, concurs: “More men want time with the family, but without giving up their careers. And more women want careers, but without giving up too much time with the family.”

He predicts “a huge fight” for the best workers, with flexibility the key.

The Netherlands once sought to keep women at home. Between 1904 and 1940, 12 different bills banned various categories of married women from paid work, perpetuating the tradition of domestic motherhood. If a woman wanted to work, a Dutch joke went, she had to become a nun.

The first part-time jobs for married women came with early labor shortages in the 1950s. But it wasn’t until 1996 that the government gave part-time employees equal status with full timers; in 2000 came the statutory right to determine work hours.

Seventy-five percent of Dutch women now work part time, compared to 41 percent in other European Union countries and 23 percent in the United States, according to Saskia Keuzenkamp at the Netherlands Institute for Social Research. Twenty-three percent of Dutch men have reduced hours, compared to 10 percent across the European Union and in the United States; another nine percent work a full week in four days.

When Jan Henk van der Velden, one of Mr. Vermaire’s law firm partners, joined 21 years ago, there were no female partners and no man would have dared ask to work part time. Today, six of the nine partners do. It works because the lawyers are flexible — when Mr. Vermaire has a court hearing on a Friday, for example, he swaps with his wife, who is normally off Mondays.

Of the 85 specialists at the Ziekenhuis Amstelland hospital south of Amsterdam, 31 are female and two-thirds work part time. Some surgeons even train part time, meaning a daily struggle to unify treatment of patients by several doctors.

“This would have been unthinkable even 10 years ago,” said Jacques Moors, the hospital’s chairman. “But if we insisted on full-time surgeons we would have a personnel problem: Three in four of our junior doctors are female.”

In male-dominated fields, the picture is more mixed. After Martina Dopper, a civil engineer at the company Ballast Nedam, requested a three-day week in 2007, she was given to understand that part time meant no promotion.

This month, however, she was promoted. “I hope this means more of my male colleagues will get an opportunity to spend more time with their families,” she said. So far, her own husband, also an engineer, does not dare for fear of jeopardizing his career.

Dutch fathers are becoming more vocal. A crop of recent books and Web sites advise men on combining career with family. Last year, a women’s magazine, Lof, set up the “Working Dad Prize,” which went to a man who won a court case against his employer enforcing his right to work part time.

The government awarded its own “Modern Man Prize” for breaking gender stereotypes. Rutger Groot Wassink won for co-founding a campaign that promotes part-time work for men — and for working four days a week himself. “Men have been excluded from this debate for too long,” said Mr. Wassink, noting a poll showing that 65 percent of Dutch fathers would like to work less.

Part-time work imposes its own rigidities. When so ubiquitous, part-time work “locks many people in,” said Janneke Platenga, professor of economics at Utrecht University. “When everyone at your daycare center works part time, do you really want to send your child five days a week and have him taken care of by several different teachers?”

At the Olefantje daycare center in Utrecht, only a handful of some 120 children come five days a week. Most teachers work four days, some three. One, Mary Chisham, takes pride in doing without daycare: she has her son Fridays, her husband, a car salesman, Mondays, and the other three days the grandparents are in charge.

“Three days is the maximum a child should spend in daycare,” she said, a view echoed in dozens of interviews with women and men.

The Netherlands may be famously liberal — marijuana is tolerated and prostitutes can join a union — but traditional gender stereotypes are strong, and for years, a labor code that empowered employees to reduce their hours has reinforced them by encouraging women to take time off during their child-bearing years.

At 70 percent, Dutch female employment is high — but Dutch women work on average no more than 24 hours a week. They earn 27 percent less than men and 57 percent are considered financially dependent, earning less than 70 percent of the gross minimum wage, or €997 a month — the equivalent of $1,300. Only four of 20 members of the current cabinet are female and 60 percent of the companies listed on the Amsterdam Euronext have no women on their boards.

According to Ellen de Bruin, the author of “Why Dutch Women Don’t Get Depressed,” Dutch women don’t seem to mind too much. She notes that 96 percent of Dutch part timers tell pollsters they do not want to work more; the Netherlands is that rare country where — even taking housework and child care into account — women work less than men.

A 2006 study showed that only 16 percent of Dutch urban women aim to reach the top and just 10 percent would sacrifice family time for a career. “We always rank low in the gender equality rankings,” said Ms. de Bruin, a journalist, “ but we rank high on happiness.”

“Spoiled princesses” is what commentator Elma Drayer calls her Dutch sisters: “Women should behave like grownups, men do it, too. At least they should be financially independent.”

More and more Dutch companies promote flexible work hours. In Tilburg, near the Belgian border, Radboud van Hal leads talent recruitment at Achmea, the largest Dutch insurance company. He has breakfast and dinner with his family, and plays soccer on Wednesday afternoons. He still works a 40-hour week.

“I work from home in the mornings and travel to work when the roads are clear,” he said. At his 19-story office building, employees have smart phones, laptops and lockers but no designated desk. The present seven work spaces for every 10 staff members will drop to six next year.

Indeed, working flexibly does not always mean working less. At Dutch Microsoft headquarters in Schiphol, Ineke Hoekman, head of human resources and mother of two, used to work part time. But in 2008, when the company moved into a space without designated work stations and employees were told to work “anywhere, any time,” she gradually went back to full time. Her team lives with Friday conference calls from her son’s soccer practice.

Aspects of this “new world of work” concept have been exported to other Microsoft offices, including Norway, France and Australia — though not yet to U.S. headquarters — but the flexibility remains broadest in the Netherlands.

Ninety-five percent of Dutch Microsoft employees work from home at least one day a week; a full quarter do so four out of five days. Each team has a “physical minimum;” some meet twice a week in the office, others once a quarter. Online communication and conference calls save time, fuel and paper waste. The company says it has cut its carbon footprint by 900 tons this year.

Even in the Netherlands, this remains the exception — but it is gaining ground. In a 24-hour world, flexibility and job sharing are inevitable, said Martijn de Wildt, chief executive of the human resource consultancy Qidos.

“Part time is an obsolete concept,” he said. “But so is full time.”

As we (and others) have pointed out, the recession was harder on men than on women, at least in terms of the unemployment rate. In a note today, a pair of Bank of America economists lay out the case for why women are likely to fare better in the recovery, as well.

Their key points:

- “For every two men that graduate from college, three women do. …”

- “As a result, the ongoing shift away from a manufacturing-based economy to a knowledge-based one should overwhelmingly help women. They make up the majority of the workforce in nine of the 10 occupations the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts will add the most jobs over the next eight years.”

- “While a gender wage gap remains, it is closing: over the last five years, the real median income for women has risen roughly 1% at an annualized rate. For men, it has contracted 1.5% at an annual rate.”

via PlanetMoney

(via Planet Money & the Wall Street Journal)

Nationwide, women who work full time still earn about 20 percent less, on average, than men. But there’s one demographic where women outearn men: people who are single, childless, and between the ages of 22 and 30. Within that universe, U.S. women earn 8 percent more than men, on average, according to a new report from the research firm Reach Advisors.

Women in this group out-earn men by an even larger margin in some metro areas — 17 percent in New York, 11 percent in San Francisco, and a high of 21 percent in Atlanta, to name a few.

The gap is driven by a bunch of familiar trends. More women than men are graduating from college these days; the wage premium for college degrees is increasing; and high-paying jobs in male-dominated fields such as manufacturing and construction are disappearing. (Also, in general, women’s wages tend to stagnate or fall after they have kids.)

This wage pattern started to emerge in big cities years ago, but it’s now spread more widely. The authors of the report looked at data from 2,000 towns and cities around the country, and found three main community-level factors that tend to boost women’s earnings relative to men within this demographic:

(1) The community has a heavy dependence on knowledge-based jobs,
which in turn serves as a magnet for well-educated women.

(2) The community has majority-minority population (i.e., non-Hispanic whites are less
than 50% of the total population). This is in part due to Hispanic and African-American
women being almost twice as likely as their male peers to earn bachelor’s and graduate degrees.

(3) The community has seen a decimation of the manufacturing employment base,
making it more difficult for men without similarly high levels of education to earn solid incomes.

Here is a list of cities where women earn more than men, from the Wall Street Journal

Generally speaking, childlessness is rising: More women are opting to forgo motherhood than their predecessors a generation ago.
Except for the most educated women, according to a report from Pew Research Center.

In the 1970s, about one in ten women just past childbearing years had never borne a child. Today, that rate is about one in five.

The trend is fairly widespread, and childless rates — that is, the percent of women ages 40-44 who have never borne any children — have risen for almost every demographic group. For every race, for example, more women today are opting out of motherhood compared to their counterparts a decade ago:

The picture looks more complicated, though, when you consider educational attainment.

In the 1990s, higher level education was associated with lower rates of motherhood; that is, the more educated a woman was, the less likely she was to have children. You can see this in the chart below, with the lighter green bars getting taller with more educated groups of women.

This pattern is not entirely true today. Check out the darker green bars in the chart below, which show the percent of women ages 40-44 in the last few years who had never had children:

Today, more education is associated with lower rates of motherhood — except for women who pursue the most advanced degrees. Women with professional degrees and Ph.D.’s are slightly more likely to have had children than their counterparts with just master’s or bachelor’s degrees.

And compared to their equally educated counterparts from the early 1990s, these advanced-degree women are much more likely to have borne children. More than a third of women with professional/Ph.D. degrees in 1992-94 decided to remain childless; in 2006-8, less than a quarter of such women made the same choice.

Perhaps this has something to do with Claudia Goldin’s findings that some of the fields that require the most educational investment upfront — like pediatrics, or veterinary medicine — also happen to be fields whose work schedules allow for a healthy work-family balance. High-achieving women who want children may be discovering this, and making their career choices accordingly.

Are there other explanations for why the country’s most educated women are more likely to have children today than they were in the 1990s?

June 25, 2010, Economix Blog, NYTimes
By CATHERINE RAMPELL

At the end of the last recession, the national unemployment rate for all civilian workers continued to rise for a couple years. This time, the national unemployment rate is actually beginning to show signs of improvement relatively quickly. This might be a short-term anomaly due to people dropping out of the labor force or it might be a sign that we’re heading toward a fairly decent recovery. Who knows?

Those with less than a high school diploma look like they’re in for some very rough times (15.6 percent and not dropping). A reasonable guess for this is that most of these low income workers are employed in construction (sector is still declining), manufacturing (not coming back), and low-wage service jobs. Skilled labor (high school grads with no college degree), on the other hand, has seen a decline in unemployment rates but it’s difficult to discern whether the rate has stabilized. Finally, the unemployment rate for college graduates is still edging upward, but it’s still not terrible by comparison (5.0 percent unemployment).

The unemployment rate for 16 to 24-year-olds is astronomical (18.9%). On average, the rate for this group is about 5-6 percentage points higher than the overall rate. Since May 2009, their unemployment rate has been 8-9 percentage points higher than everyone else. This increase in the disparity between unemployment rates didn’t emerge during the last recession. Unfortunately, their unemployment rate doesn’t appear to be falling.

The 25 to 34-year-old crowd (young adults) has seen its unemployment rate improve in the last few months. The rate for this group has tracked very closely the rate for the nation as a whole during this past decade. Last year, however, a gap between the two looked to have been building, but it’s starting to close now. This might be a sign that employers are starting to give younger workers a shot again.

The last chart showing national unemployment rates by gender might be the most revealing of all. During the last ten years, the rates for men and women only showed a slight hint at diverging after the last recession. This time, however, a tremendous gap opened between the two. Currently, the national rate for men stands at 10.7 percent, but their better half is fairing relatively well at 8.6 percent.

So, to sum these data up: young, uneducated male workers are taking the brunt of the blow from the “Great Recession.” Sectors (e.g., manufacturing and construction) that traditionally rely on these workers show few signs of hiring en masse any time soon, spelling trouble for communities and regions reliant on blue-collar industries. For the rest of the labor force and communities with higher skilled workers, there might be some light of the end of this very long and dark tunnel we’ve been in.