Politics and my friend Maria

I got to know my friend Maria way back when we were both 18. We were paired up in a dorm room as freshmen. We became friends in the very uncomplicated way 18-year-olds become friends when they share a dorm room: we bonded over figuring out life away from home, good or bad grades, and late-night phonecalls to our respective long-distance boyfriends. Throughout our student years and beyond, we met for coffee, movies, walks and meals, invited each other to our various parties, took a climbing class together, and eventually we even stopped introducing each other as “my former dorm roommate” (so much for the European definition of “friend” vs. the American one). We stayed in touch through my years in the US, not particularly frequently, but we also did not feel the need to contact each other every week. Whenever we met, no matter how long it had been, we had great chats and it largely felt like no time had passed.

A week ago on Sunday, Maria and I went for a long walk along the Donaukanal, followed by some delicious tea and cake at a trendy café by the riverbank. The Donaukanal was beautiful in its urban way, sporting some last fall colors along with the usual colorful graffiti. And my amazement with this much flowing water has not worn off yet. The tea was also impressive, as it was not your odd tea bag, no, it was a bundle of fresh herbs to be drowned in the hot water. Never seen that before.

For Maria and me, it was the first time in years that we hung out together without it being the “OMG, we haven’t talked for AGES, what’s going on in your life”?-kind. When you become friends at age 18, you cannot easily guess whether you’ll still have anything in common at age 31, especially when you embark on very different careers, and spend years apart in different corners of the world. But we still get along wonderfully. I almost forgot how much I enjoy talking politics with her. This time, we re-bonded over something that we now have in common: We are both 31, unmarried and childless (but in LTR's), on relatively ambitious career tracks and have, at some point in the last few years, veered off a path many Austrian women take: sacrificing their careers for raising children.

I know I am venturing into emotional territory here (“What’s wrong with prioritizing your children?”), so I want to emphasize that I am not talking about a couple making a well-planned and conscious decision to temporarily dial back the career of one or both partners to make space for the family. I am talking about a large group of educated, highly trained mothers sliding into a traditional housewife role through a string of small, voluntary steps, subtly guided by a complex interplay of social norms and the welfare system, and jeopardizing their own future economic base in the process. I am a scientist, so without any further dangerous navigation through risky verbiage, here’s some stats (all data from Statistik Austria, for the years 2010 or 2011):

87.3% of women with children under 8 interrupted their employment when the youngest child was born, compared to 6.4% of men. Fair enough, someone has to give birth after all. But, of those 87.3%, only 13% interrupted their employment for less than a year, and only 5.6% for less than 6 months. 70.7% of women with children under 3 are not employed. Of women with children under 15, 64.7% are employed - compared to 93% of men. Of those 64.7%, 43.4% are working part time (cf. 4 % of the men). That means, only 36.6% of women with children under 15 are working full-time. Of the employed men with children under 15, 78% state that their partner is taking care of the children during work time, for the employed women with children under 15, that same rate is 30%. A few circumstantial facts: 56% of all university degrees and 43.5% of all doctorates are earned by women. The “unexplained gender pay gap” is about 18% (it’s around 25% if you include the “explained” parts, such as the split into the different kinds of jobs women and men tend to work). The divorce rate (the probability that current marriages will end that year) is around 43%. Single (or divorced) women with children are among the groups with the highest risk of poverty. Retirement pensions (a part of the social welfare system here) for women hover around half of those for men, largely due to the gender pay gap and time spent outside of the workforce while raising children.

Ignoring any big-picture economic viewpoint, one might ask: if the career interruption opted for by many women is voluntary, what is the problem? You cannot judge people for how they choose to organize their lives. But, well, “voluntary” is an interesting concept. If you feel “strongly compelled” or “morally obligated” to do something, or simply “can’t see another way to make it work”, how voluntary is it? A last tidbit from Statistik Austria: the most common complaint of those part-time working women with children under 15 is that they cannot find childcare that would allow them to work more hours.

On our long walk, Maria and I chewed through quite a few of the many factors that come together to produce statistics like this and the question of the “voluntariness” of it all. Perhaps a couple things are worth mentioning: One is that there is a long-standing notion that young children should be spending 100% of their time with their mothers (nevermind the fathers, they usually don’t even enter statements like “It’s not good for a 6-month old to be taken away from their mother and handed to a stranger!”). Another is that there is an equally long-standing notion that “combining children and career is difficult”, usually formulated as uniquely female problem (men are fine, men with children are responsible fathers of families.) Both together strongly transport the message that as a woman, you have to make a choice between family (and in particular, being a "good mother") and a career. Also, men are automatically assumed to be ambitious and career-focused, while women are automatically assumed to be quiet and family-focused. Needless to say, the automatic assumptions of your social surroundings go a long way when you’re a kid or young adult looking for guidance. The way the social welfare system is currently set up, women are pretty much told that “what you do” is: you take between one and three years off for each child. The government will give you money for up to three years, and technically, you are still entitled to your job after two. Partly as a consequence, a vicious supply-demand cycle makes daycare for children under 3 a pain and a half to find. Just for good measure, Kindergarten for kids over 3, and primary school traditionally only do half days. And last but not least, in a society that is generally slow and often reluctant in changing its ways, men and women slip into traditional gender roles in their relationships as a matter of course. The mother staying at home with the children for several years, during which she is (understandably) responsible for the entire household, cements those roles and sets the example for the next generation. I could dig up more statistics on things like how the housework is split, but I’ll save you another paragraph full of percentages.

Why do we care, Maria and I? Of course it’s a classic “cause” you can care about. But I think we care on a more personal level, too. First, people like me and her and our partners can wind up competing with men with housewives in professional life. Once people like us start a family, on the basis of sharing the many duties, joys and chores of life evenly, we have to face the truth that nobody in such a partnership can put quite as much time and energy into their work as a man with a housewife (or a woman with a house-husband, of course, but we can all take a good educated guess about the percentage of that among Austrian couples with children under 15). I am not trying to blanket-accuse all men with housewives of not caring about spending time with their family. It just feels like they have a “secret superpower” that allows them to rarely ever have to worry about things like getting off work early enough to pick up the children from somewhere or what to make for dinner. (It reminds me of a certain incident of playing an area-control boardgame with a couple and a few other people: the man in the couple won the game by a large margin, essentially because the woman protected him and did not care to win herself. The rest of us were in an unfair disadvantage and the game was frustrating.) Another reason we care is because how couples our age share the family duties impacts how society views us and what people expect of us. Maria and I are both lucky to be in good job situations right now, but for many women in their 30s seeking a job in Austria, there are issues around employers’ implicit expectations of them taking years off and/or being less dedicated of a worker than a man for reasons to do with raising children.

If you have followed me through here, thank you. Maria suggested I split the entry in two parts, because it’s too long, and I agree in principle. It would have left me with one entry entirely about Maria, and another entirely about politics. There’s nothing wrong with the latter, but the former would have left me feeling strongly compelled to (completely voluntarily) write similar entries about all my dear friends here, and all my dear friends there, and that just might not be compatible with a career in my day job…