NPR has a nice little feature on parental leave policy in Sweden. This relates to my own research on working time, and I think parental leave is a particularly interesting case when it comes to the politics and sociology of time. That’s because I’ve come around to thinking — partly under the influence of my adviser, Janet Gornick — that the issue of reducing working hours is connected to feminism and gender equality at a fundamental level.

That’s because paid work time isn’t the only working time we need to think about — there’s also the unpaid cooking, cleaning, shopping, care of children and elders, and so on, that’s done for free. This work is still disproportionately done by women. Given that fact, it’s highly likely that any reform that makes it easier to reduce paid working time will inadvertently tend to reinforce the gender division of labor, in which men do paid work and women do unpaid work in the home that is not as highly valued. This moves us away from the “dual caregiver, dual earner” model that I think would be preferable from the standpoint of gender equality.

As things stand now, women will generally be more likely to reduce their hours than men when the opportunity presents itself. Women may then face discrimination in the labor market because employers start to assume that men will work longer hours. This is a concern even in a country like the Netherlands, which has a lot of protections for part-timers and a huge number of part-time jobs, and hence is a beguiling model for shorter-hours advocates like me.