Abstract
This overview of the differently structured outcomes that social policy creates for women and men in highly developed capitalist economies is a wonderful antidote to the classic undergraduate argument that places all the onus of gender inequality on “women’s choices.” Becky Pettit and Jennifer Hook carefully trace the institutional arrangements that shape both women’s and men’s choices of what portions of their lives to dedicate to paid work, how to balance earning an income with providing care, broad categories of jobs for which they compete, and the income differences that result under different types of social policy regimes. The book thus offers a nicely connected picture of what social arrangements lead to which different kinds of gender inequalities, while also emphasizing that such inequalities are not simple to array on any one single dimension of “goodness” for women.
In addition to providing a well-organized overview of the differences among the large set of OECD countries they analyze, Pettit and Hook take advantage of multiple waves of data from most of these countries to show how changes in economic conditions impact the levels of inequalities, and how shifts in demands for gender specific labor are connected to ways in which public sector employment develops. The nature of public services has a double impact on women’s lives, both by providing essential care work in the form of paid labor and by drawing women into the provision of these services for pay. They also use the United States and West Germany in each chapter as cases that illustrate divergent developments—the United States moving toward a work-intensive, full-time employment model for women, even mothers of young children, at the expense of “balance” but West Germany emphasizing long maternal leaves and the part-time employment of mothers, at the cost of women’s ability to move into better paying occupations as well as into career tracks that pay more generously.
One conclusion that emerges sharply from their multi-country models is that the more difficult it is for mothers to hold jobs, the more exclusive the pool of women who actually manage this feat, and the less significant the gender gap in occupation and income between women and men in that country. Conversely, when state policies encourage and support women’s—and especially mothers’—employment, the pool of women involved in the labor force grows, the quality of jobs declines, and the gender gap grows. They call this the “inclusion-inequality dilemma” and it is part of their broader picture of connections among policy outcomes.
But rather than pity the poor policy maker who can never do just one thing, Pettit and Hook suggest taking further steps to try to reduce inequalities in the gender-segmented labor markets to which inclusive policies give rise. In fact, wage protections for part-time workers and active steps to encourage engagement of fathers in childcare and housework—such as so-called “daddy months” of use-it-or-lose it parental leave—are strategies being tried in the European Union today. While it is too soon to say if the outcomes will be all that Pettit and Hook wish for, there is no question that the direction of change is congruent with their overall analysis.
Another merit of this fine book is that they do not take the multi-national comparison as an excuse to avoid dealing with the complexity of intersectionality at the national level. In addition to selecting the United States and Germany as their case study nations to illustrate the separate parts of their chain of analysis, they provide a chapter that compares the situations of African American, other ethnic, and “white” families in the United States with Turkish (the predominant and negatively racialized group), other “immigrant background” and ethnic German families in West Germany. The analysis highlights some of the important inter-country differences in how residential segregation, educational exclusions and hiring discrimination interact with gendered norms for seeking higher education and working outside the home, providing material for useful discussions of how culture and structure interact for gender and ethnicity in the context of social policy with particular historical legacies.
Overall, the merits of the book greatly outweigh its shortcomings. Although it offers little description or analysis of what the parameters of policy are in the different countries, these rules are constantly changing and any overview eventually would be out of date in some cases. Germany in particular has recently adopted a new set of parental leave provisions that move in the direction Pettit and Hook would admire, but it is too soon to see if they have the anticipated effects. There are, of course, data limitations in the availability and comparability of indicators across these countries, sometimes making the analysis less complex than ideal (especially in terms of educational and occupational segregation factors). Most importantly, however, the book is only available at this time in hardcover, which limits its usefulness for teaching. That is a great shame, as it is as accessibly written as one might hope for such a quantitative study and speaks to questions that one would hope every class on gender, stratification and social policy would want to address. Price availability is at least a fixable flaw, and one we can hope the publisher will remedy as soon as possible.