PROMOTING GENDER EQUALITY, BIRTHRATES

PROMOTING GENDER EQUALITY, BIRTHRATES, OR HUMAN CAPITAL? GERMANY, JAPAN AND FAMILY POLICY DISCOURSE Martin Seeleib-Kaiser and Tuukka Toivonen

1. Introduction The comparative welfare state literature has identified social democracy together with organized women’s movements as the key drivers of employment-oriented family policies in Western democracies (Huber and Stephens 2001; Iversen and Stephens 2008). However, we are presently witnessing a puzzling expansion in precisely these kinds of policies in countries where social democratic and feminist forces are much weaker. While shedding light on the logic of salient new programmes, recent studies have run short of explaining why and how family policies have emerged in ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ welfare states in the first place (cf. e.g. Lewis and Campbell 2007a; Orloff 2006). Even less progress has been made in explaining such developments in East Asian contexts. This study addresses such gaps in our understanding regarding the development of employment-oriented family policies in ‘unlikely’ environments by focusing on the cases of Germany and Japan in the 2000s. As is well known, in the comparative welfare state literature Germany has been identified as the proto-type ‘conservative’ welfare state, while the categorization of Japan has been more contested (Esping-Andersen 1990, 1997; Goodman and Peng 1996). In the domain of family policy, however, both countries long promoted a strong male breadwinner model (Lewis 1992) by enforcing a clear gender-based division of labour, providing a family wage, discouraging married women from engaging in full-time work, and promoting family-based social care (cf. Ōsawa 2004). The approach of both countries to family policy has, however, shifted quite remarkably in recent years (Peng 2002; Toivonen 2007; Fleckenstein and Seeleib-Kaiser 2009; Henninger, Wimbauer and Dombrowski 2008). Germany has introduced an earnings-related parental leave scheme in addition to expanding child care provision,

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martin seeleib-kaiser and tuukka toivonen

and Japan has likewise begun crafting a family policy regime with apparent ‘Nordic shades’. These policy changes are not well explained by the ‘usual suspects’ of party competition or the activities of women’s groups. Neither do very low fertility rates – assumed by many to catalyze family policy expansion – drive reforms in any direct sense. Figure 1 traces trends in fertility rates in Germany and Japan between 1960 and 2006 while indicating when the issue of dwindling births emerged as a serious public concern – i.e., as a ‘social problem’ – in these countries. In addition the figure shows the timing of landmark reforms in parental leave. The first thing we note from here is that, once these countries had plunged into sub-replacement-level fertility (i.e., a TFR lower than 2.1), birthrate worries remained largely off the public and political radars for a substantial stretch of time – up to around 15 years in Japan and 35 years in Germany. It seems indeed puzzling from the vantage point of the present that low fertility should have remained ‘invisible’ for so long, especially in the case of Germany where the TFR sank to the region of 1.5 already in the mid-1970s and has remained more or less flat thereafter. We also see from figure 1 that relatively generous, income-related parental leave schemes appeared in these countries only after the emergence of low fertility as a public issue, at seemingly random points in time. Although the TFR is indeed not the only important demographic variable – nor is parental leave the only noteworthy new policy measure – this brief exercise suggests that instead of focusing on any presumed, direct effects of demographic trends on policy change, we must analyze much more closely the processes that lie in between. Examining earlier family policy developments in Germany, SeeleibKaiser (2002) and Bleses and Seeleib-Kaiser (2004) have demonstrated the importance of changing discourses in the reform process, while Henninger, Wimbauer and Dombrowski (2008), in pondering whether demography might act as a ‘push’ to gender equality, agree that “fiscal and economic as well as demographic challenges are not challenges per se, but become so in a process of collective interpretation and are framed quite differently in diverse national contexts” (Henninger, Wimbauer and Dombrowski 2008: 307). In order to fully benefit from this critical insight, however, we must go a step further and conceptualize more concisely how challenges enter discourse and how discourse, in turn, translates into policy. Figure 2 provides an accessible illustration of our theoretical schema. First, in accordance with the so-called Thomas theorem that stipulates situations are real in their consequences when people define them

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Source of TFR statistics: OECD (2009a).

Figure 1 Fertility trends and important family policy events in Germany and Japan

as ‘real’, we posit that various socio-economic occurrences become ‘problems’ only when they are so perceived and constructed. Thus, as shown in Figure 2, purported ‘challenges’ enter the policy discourse through the claims and pronouncements of relevant actors, including interest groups, academics and others with access to effective media, all of whom are, to some degree at least, exposed to international discourses (or ‘ideas’). These actors put forth contesting framings that prescribe how given ‘challenges’ are supposed to interact with the welfare state (or social policies or communities) and how they should be addressed. Influenced but not predetermined by prevailing power relations, from this struggle new dominant ‘interpretative patters’ emerge that powerfully shape subsequent policy responses (Seeleib-Kaiser 2002: 37; Bleses & Seeleib-Kaiser 2004). These interpretative patterns “combine various themes, set preferences among them, link the positions (pro or con) with the various themes, and set the various themes in relation to abstract values, which at the same time connect the themes on a generalized level” (Gerhards 1995: 224, authors’ translation).

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Source: Adapted from Bleses and Seeleib-Kaiser (2004) with modifications.

Figure 2 How ‘challenges’ enter into political discourse and form into new interpretative patterns, leading to policy responses

They moreover evolve within the constraints of normative frames (or ‘principled beliefs’) and designate causal relationships. Although it is not always possible to describe in complete detail the emergence of new interpretative patterns, this approach directly informs our investigation and can be built upon in related accounts. Scrutinizing key developments in German and Japanese family policy in the 2000s from such a theoretical standpoint, we find that towards the middle of this decade, new family policies came to be justified by key actors in both countries with recourse to human capital arguments. More so than general concerns over demographic decline, work-family conflict or indeed gender equality objectives, employing and retaining female workers with high human capital while prompting them to reproduce (Germany) and raising worker productivity (Japan) became pivotal to the legitimization of new employmentrelated policies for families. Intriguingly, German reform efforts in fact led to a limited success – an entitlement to a more generous, incomerelated parental benefit in 2007 – whereas the Japanese ‘Work-Life

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Balance’ campaign struggled to produce substantial reforms in policy and practice. This differential success of human capital discourses in Germany and Japan can, we argue, be understood in terms of the formation and non-formation of powerful new interpretative patterns. This underscores the need to examine national discourses in depth and contests the proposition that low birth rates directly drive family policy expansion. This paper proceeds through four further sections. First, we review the current international literature on family policies, discerning four prominent lines of argument in favour of family policy expansion (Section 2). We then examine related socio-economic trends in Germany and Japan (Section 3) and sketch out the ‘family policy legacies’ of these nations since the 1970s (Section 4). In what is the core section of the paper, Section 5 analyzes family policy debates in both countries in the 2000s. Finally, we gauge the critical similarities and differences of German and Japanese family policy discourses and briefly consider implications for further research. 2. International Academic Discourses on Family Policies Family policy has become a prominent subject in mainstream comparative academic and policy debates only very recently. It was as late as the 1990s that most European countries seriously began designing new family policies to support women’s employment, although Scandinavian nations had started doing so considerably earlier (EspingAndersen 2002). The UK, for example, “had no identifiable model for ‘reconciling’ or ‘balancing’ work and family” before 1997 (Lewis and Campbell 2007b). One can interpret family policy reforms as governments’ efforts to counter so-called ‘new risks’ (Taylor-Gooby 2004; Bonoli 2005) that spring from the growing labour market participation of women and from the family’s decreasing stability and ability to furnish social care, or, following Esping-Andersen (2009), they may be seen as adaptations to an (as of yet) ‘incomplete revolution’ where women’s work and reproductive patterns have undergone a fundamental upheaval. Needless to say, however, the arguments put forth in support of new family policies have not converged around a single line of reasoning, but have remained impressively diverse. In the following we identify four prominent, distinctive family policy discourses that are put forward within the international academic discourse. This exercise

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supplies us with a critical conceptual background to our subsequent analysis of specific German and Japanese discourses. Gender Equality: Salient gender equality arguments posit that women and men have equal rights and should thus be treated equally in society, and they typically recognize that women are systematically disadvantaged vis-à-vis men due to their different relationship to the labour market (cf. e.g. Daly and Rake 2003: 89). Although the precise meaning of ‘gender equality’ (in labour markets and welfare states) remains subject to debate, it is usually pointed out that women have caring duties which put limits on their involvement in paid work, reduces their earnings capacity and shapes their careers; that this tends to make women dependent on their partners; and that welfare states have, more often than not, actively reinforced such dependence while undervaluing informal care (Lewis 1992; Ōsawa 2004). It follows that to promote gender equality, measures that put women on par with men in terms of access to work, diverse careers, and earnings are demanded, and it is simultaneously required that men increase their participation in care and house work. Gender equality objectives had a major impact on the development of Nordic family policies in particular, as women asserted in the 1960s and 1970s that they, as citizens of democratic countries, also had the right to engage in paid work (Huber and Stephens 2001; Sainsbury 2004). Measures such as maternal and parental leave – the latter made available to both women and men – as well as high quality child care (also to very young children) are examples of family policies that can potentially promote gender equality, especially in the ‘social democratic’ sense. They do so particularly when they facilitate mothers’ swift return to the labour markets after child-bearing. Work-Life Balance / Work-Family Reconciliation: Work-life balance and work-family reconciliation have become popular ways to frame debates on family policy in North America and Europe. While the terminology of ‘work-life balance’ originated in the US and has been propagated internationally by American multinational companies (Gambles, Lewis and Rapoport 2006: 34), ‘work-family reconciliation’ is favoured in Europe where the EU has actively promoted it. In terms of social policy, these ‘balancing/reconciliation’ discourses can be used to argue for measures that would also be supported by gender equality advocates, including well-compensated family leave,

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accessible child care services, working hour reductions and flexible work arrangements, but with relatively more emphasis on the latter two. Since they tend to de-emphasize gender, however, ‘balancing’ discourses do not necessarily demand that policies actively promote a more equal sharing of work and care duties between men and women. Although potentially related to a variety of considerations, the case for ‘balancing/reconciliation’ is often made with direct reference to human capital concerns. Consequently, it is proposed that work-life balance policies can reduce employee stress, depression and absenteeism, which accordingly is seen to increase worker loyalty, motivation and productivity (OECD 2007: 185). ‘Family friendly’ company policies can help recruit and retain highly skilled workers who tend to be difficult to replace and in whom companies invest considerable resources. The case for such policies appears to be most persuasive for large companies requiring workers with (high) general skills, as opposed to smaller (manufacturing) companies that require workers with industry-specific skills (Seeleib-Kaiser and Fleckenstein 2009; also cf. OECD 2007: 186). On a more macro level, ‘work-life balance’ policies can maximize the supply of high quality human capital by making talented females more available for work. Such policies are thus inherently desirable from the point of view of labour market efficiency and productivity, but companies are likely to support them most actively during labour shortages or when they feel that the existing (male) labour force is not sufficient to fulfil their needs. Human capital arguments for family policies may thus be used to promote measures similar to those favoured by gender advocates (including raising the female employment rate), but their underlying premises are very different and more contingent on the state of the labour markets as well as industry needs. Social Investment: The argument that family policy should be viewed as a ‘social investment’ is most lucidly put forth by Esping-Andersen (2002, 2009) who incorporates a variety of concerns under the umbrella of a ‘child-centred social investment strategy’. For him, supporting mothers’ employment is imperative not only to increase the labour supply but also to reduce child poverty. Combating child poverty is crucial as early development has a tremendous impact on individuals’ cognitive skills and life chances, hence influencing the quality of the (future) human capital stock of each country. According to EspingAndersen gender equality policies are compatible and synergistic with

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human capital development, national productivity as well as competitiveness, and also hold the promise of higher fertility. Women’s paid employment (alongside skills training) is thus framed as something of a panacea to a range of concerns, but only if it is of sufficiently high quality (cf. also Giddens 1998; Jenson and Saint-Martin 2006). Raising Fertility: Finally, there are arguments that are more expressly concerned with raising the TFR in a given country or across a set of countries (as in the EU) through devising family policies. Although unequivocal evidence does not exist, it is now implicitly assumed in many studies and reports that policies that support women’s employment are closely connected to higher fertility (cf. Bonoli 2008 for a review). Castles (2003) posits that there has been a ‘reversal’ across the OECD: ‘familial’ countries that used to have the highest fertility rates now have the lowest, and Nordic countries where female employment is high produce comparatively more children. Governments that are concerned about their countries’ fertility levels and the future implications of ageing and shrinking populations thus look to new family policies as potential ‘solutions’. The paradox is that, despite the fact that most OECD countries now have sub-replacement levels of fertility, raising the birth rate through policy measures is not an explicit public policy objective except in a handful of countries (OECD 2007: 13). This may be because of the politically sensitive and highly personal, private nature of the issue, the salience of other family policy priorities, or the wish to promote fertility only in implicit terms. Fertility arguments thus form a conspicuously ‘muted’ discourse compared to the other three included in this review. Striving to raise fertility in current democratic contexts would, plausibly, imply a wide package of family policies that, among other things, would facilitate female labour market participation and offset both the direct and indirect child-rearing costs incurred by parents. On the other hand, while such a package would indeed have to be extensive and expensive, it would not necessarily be consistent with gender equality concerns. For example, a particular group of women could be encouraged to stay at home to produce and take care of a large number of children, or, alternatively, highly educated elite women who wish to work continuously could be made into the prime target of profertility policies. Moreover, if the goal is merely to increase the number of births, alleviating child poverty would not necessarily have to be part of a fertility-centred approach.

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In addition to these four streams, there are of course other arguments that have been put forth in favour of particular family policies. Daly and Rake (2003) and Hochschild (1995) have highlighted ‘care deficits’ and pressures, but this view is rather rarely articulated by governments and in current mainstream debates. We are also cognizant of demands that governments should protect the normative, male-breadwinner/ female-caregiver family institution, but these demands tended to define earlier conservative family policy agendas and have now largely taken a backseat to the four discourses we have outlined above. 3. The Socio-Economic Context for Family Policy Having set out prominent academic family policy discourses above, we provide essential context to family policy developments in Germany and Japan here through a brief review of recent socio-economic trends. As we have pointed out in our introduction, while socio-economic trends never directly translate into policy responses, they do structure policy in manifold ways when constructed by actors as ‘challenges’. In this section we strive to capture key dimensions that have shaped both German and Japanese family policy debates. Sharing a common trend with the majority of other developed nations, both Germany and Japan have witnessed a gradual rise in the labour force participation of women in the past decades (cf. Figure 3). Although a much higher share of Japanese than German women were engaged in paid work in the 1970s, as a result of a substantial upwards leap in the early 1990s in the German rates, this situation has now reversed, with female employment rates in Germany being nearly 4 per cent above those in Japan. In both countries male and female employment rates are undergoing a process of convergence. In social policy literature, it has been noted with equal frequency that as the rate of working women has increased and as more have progressed to higher education, women have begun to bear children much later and in fewer quantities than before. As Table 1 illustrates, closely reflecting trends elsewhere, German and Japanese women now have their first babies when they are slightly over 29 – a delay of 5.1 and 3.5 years, respectively, compared to 1970 levels. The precipitous drop in the German and Japanese birth rates that was illustrated in Figure 1 above is set into a wider context in Table 2. What we see from here is that Germany and Japan are not the only countries experiencing extremely low total fertility levels – they are

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Note: Data for Germany before 1991 refers to West Germany. Source: OECD (2009b).

Figure 3 Male and female labour force participation in Germany and Japan, 1970–2007 (15–64 year olds)

Table 1 Women’s age at first childbirth in selected OECD countries

Canada Denmark Finland France Germany Japan Korea Norway Sweden Switzerland United Kingdom United States

1970

1980

2000

2005

23.7 23.8 24.4 24.4 24.0 25.6

24.9

25.7 25.3

25.3

24.1

22.7

27.1 27.3 27.4 27.8 28.2 28.0 27.7 26.9 27.9 28.7 29.1 24.9

28.0 28.4 27.9 28.5 29.1 29.1 29.1 27.7 28.7 29.5 29.8 25.2

26.4

Source: OECD (2009a).

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Table 2 Fertility rates and share of births outside marriage

Canada Denmark Finland France Germany Italy Japan Korea Norway Spain Sweden Switzerland United Kingdom United States OECD-28

Total Fertility Rate

Share of births outside marriage

1.54 1.85 1.84 1.98 1.33 1.35 1.32 1.13 1.90 1.38 1.85 1.44 1.84 2.10 1.61

24.5 46.4 40.6 49.5 30.0 18.6 2.1 1.5 53.1 28.4 55.5 15.4 43.7 38.5 32.9

Source: OECD (2009a).

joined by ‘familialistic’ Mediterranean nations such as Italy and Spain, as well as by South Korea. Japan, alongside South Korea, stands out in one aspect: it is home to a conspicuously low share of out-of-wedlock births (cf. Hertog 2009). At the other end of the spectrum we observe that all of those countries where close to or more than 40 per cent of births occur outside marriage enjoy TFRs higher than 1.8. In the context of declining fertility, more attention has been given not only to female labour force participation in general but also to maternal employment in particular. The ability of mothers with small children to partake in paid work and generate substantial earnings is, as we have already seen, an issue of high relevance to almost all family policy agendas, from gender equality and work-family reconciliation to ‘social investment’ and raising fertility. Table 3, while not showing trends over time, reveals that significant cross-national differences still exist on this dimension, with Nordic countries occupying the top end and Germany and Japan finding themselves at the bottom as far as the mothers of under six year old children are concerned. Not unrelated to maternal employment rates, child poverty indicators also belie some interesting trends that are, if anything, becoming

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increasingly central to family debates (see Section 2). If OECD figures are to be trusted (cf. Table 4), Germany in particular has seen a massive increase in the share of children living in poverty since the mid-1990s, although its child poverty rate (16 per cent) is still below that of the United States (21 per cent), yet slightly above that of Japan (14 per cent). Poverty in households led by a non-employed single-parent is high across the board, albeit sharply lower among households headed by single parents who work. Most striking here is the almost negligible differential between the poverty rates of households led by non-working single parents and those headed by employed single parents in Japan (60 per cent against 58 per cent). This can be partly explained with reference to a persistently strong male-breadwinner system, women’s low average earnings vis-à-vis men, and the fact that up to half of the female labour force in Japan is engaged in ‘irregular’ (parttime and limited-period contract) jobs. If only to highlight a crucial difference in the family policy landscapes of Germany and Japan, it is informative to see how annual working hours differ between these countries. Although both societies have seen steady declines since the 1980s, aggregate data still shows that the Japanese annually spend nearly 500 hours longer at paid work than the Germans (cf. Table 5). While a detailed breakdown of this Table 3 Maternal employment rates in selected OECD countries, 2005 (women aged 15–64) By age of youngest child

Canada Denmark Finland France Germany Japan Sweden Switzerland United Kingdom United States OECD average

0–16