Six - Promoting social investment through work–family policies: which nations do it and why?

Summary

Work–family reconciliation policies are a lynchpin of the social investment approach. High-quality early childhood education and care (ECEC) programmes invest in both the cognitive development of young children and the labour market skills of their mothers by enabling them to participate in paid work. Employment continuity also bolsters household income, reducing child poverty and its potentially enduring effects. Parental leave and flexible work time promote women's paid work while enabling children to benefit from periods of parental care. Finally, ECEC services can be a source of employment for women who might otherwise struggle to find a foothold in the labour market.

Despite these apparent benefits, few countries have adopted work–family policies that fully promote social investment aims. In this chapter, I evaluate country policies according to how they perform on a social investment triad: activation of women's employment; promotion of gender equality; and fostering of child development through quality care. Very few countries emphasise all three dimensions; more commonly, countries focus on only one dimension while ignoring the other two. Evaluating nine Western European countries by these criteria, I qualify three as social investment ‘pioneers’ – France, Norway and Sweden – that were the first to adopt these kinds of policies; three as relatively recent ‘path shifters’ – Germany, the Netherlands and the UK; and three as ‘slow movers’ – Austria, Italy and Spain – that have made incremental changes to their menu of work–family policies.

What political forces have driven or stymied movement towards the social investment approach in these nine countries? Governments generally have not followed a consistent template of social investment ideas. Instead, domestic political and economic circumstances have influenced the three policy dimensions. Policies to promote women's employment are often, but not exclusively, done under left governments, but only in a context of rising female workforce participation and intensifying electoral competition over the female vote. When middle-class women, in particular, are seen as an important voting bloc worth pursuing and these women are struggling with balancing paid work and family, left (and, at times, conservative) governments have often responded with supportive public policies.