THE Dutch are generally a pretty content bunch. The Netherlands consistently ranks as one of the best places in the world to live. Dutch kids are among the happiest in the world, according to Unicef. Some attribute their high quality of life and general good nature to a laid-back approach to work: more than half of the Dutch working population works part time, a far greater share than in any other rich-world country. On average only a fifth of the working-age population in EU member states holds a part-time job (8.7% of men and 32.2% of women); in the Netherlands 26.8% of men and 76.6% of women work less than 36 hours a week. Why?

Part of the reason is that Dutch women were relative latecomers to the labour market. Compared with other countries, few men had to leave to fight in the world wars of the 20th century, with the result that women did not labour in factories as they did in the US and Britain. Thanks to the country's wealth, a dual income was not a necessity for a comfortable life. And Dutch politics was dominated by Christian values until the 1980s: the focus was mainly on providing state aid (implicit subsidies in the fiscal system) so that women could stay at home with children.

This changed in the late 1980s, when the state realised that it would be a good idea to mobilise women into the workforce. But the cultural conviction that families still needed mothers to be home for tea-time prevailed, so the state worked closely with employers to ensure that the new part-time jobs would enjoy similar legal status to their full-time equivalents. This has, to an extent, continued: in 2000 the right for women and men to ask for a job to be part-time was written into law. But Ronald Dekker, a labour economist at Tilburg University, thinks this law is a confirmation of existing practice and therefore largely symbolic, only necessary for certain “archaic industries”. Instead, he reckons, the high prevalence of part-time jobs is largely down to the wide availability of good quality, well-paid “first tier” part-time jobs in the Netherlands: jobs often considered inferior in many other countries.

Whether part-time work is good for emancipation is questionable. Today, perhaps because part-time work is the norm, women in the Netherlands have a relatively high labour-force participation rate. But the Netherlands’ record for getting women into top management roles is dire. The prevalence of part-time work seems to play a role: once you strip out part-timers, women make it into management roles nearly as often as men, according to the CBS (the main statistics agency in the Netherlands) although that doesn't include top management. The Dutch government has said that 30% of executive board positions should be held by women, but that may prove excessively optimistic; the level in 2015 was just 6%, according to Mijntje Luckerath, an academic at Tilburg University, who blames old-fashioned selection processes. And not all part-timers are pleased with their situation: before the financial crisis, fewer than 10% of Dutch part-timers wished they were employed full time; this has since risen to nearly 25%. That percentage is still much lower than in other EU countries, but it is a striking rise.

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