Chat with Neil Gilbert
May 12th, 2008 by Holly Fox
On May 9, I had the opportunity to ask Neil Gilbert, author of A Mother’s Work: How Feminism, the Market, and Policy Shape Family Life. He answered my questions about the effectiveness of children’s allowances and about the possibility of a sequential approach to family and career.
Listen to the interview here: chat with Neil Gilbert here or read the transcript below:
Neil Gilbert interview transcript
FP: This is Holly Fox from Familienpolitik, the blog about family policy around the world, and I’m talking to Neil Gilbert, the of author the new book A Mother’s Work: how feminism, the market, and policy shape family life.
FP: How did you initially get into family policy and begin this book A Mother’s Work?
NG: Between 1976 and 2002, the proportion of women who were childless in the United States doubled. This happened in a very brief period, 25 years, 26 year. It is historically unprecedented. And that is, you know, you had rises in childlessness in periods of famine and pestilence and war. This was a very prosperous time, and yet we have this incredible demographic shift and increase in childlessness in women. And so the question is, “What was causing this? Why did this happen?”
FP: How much did you find that US family policy influenced that rise in childless mothers?
NG: Our fertility rate in the United States is just fine compared to Europe. I mean the Italians are going out of business. For much of the European continent their fertility rate almost everywhere, except France, well France is close, is below the United States. So the question of course comes, well how does family policy impact this trend? And I began to look at patented expenditure in European countries on what they call family benefits.
FP: How significant a role do programs that pay people to have children actually play into a couples’ decision to have children?
NG: Oh, historically that’s never had any effect. We can go back to right after the Second World War and take a look at what happened. And you see countries like France had this children’s benefit. It was a pro-natalist effort. They wanted to increase the birthrate. And in fact the birthrate in France increased significantly. And so some people said, “Ah, you see. This children’s allowance, this pro-natalist effort works.” But the fact was that in the United States the birthrate increased at the same rate as in France and we had no children’s allowance. Having children is a very fundamentally life-altering experience. I imagine you could give people enough money so that they’d make that decision but the amounts that these family policies offered simply were not enough. They might make it a little easier, once you made the decision, to afford things. But I don’t think the decisions were impacted. And the evidence is not at all clear that it has any benefit at all.
FP: In your book you criticize some family policy as being not so much family friendly as market friendly. What do you think a truly family friendly policy would look like?
NG: It would be a policy that gives families choice. Right now family-friendly policy, so-called, is market policy. These are policies designed to get women, women mainly, back to work as quickly as possible. That is, it is to make birth an event that is as brief as possible an interruption. And that’s fine for women who really want to work, but a policy that offers choice, let’s say if the government is going to subsidize daycare for a huge portion of the population that wants to go back to work, they should then offer the mothers who don’t want to go back to work a homecare allowance to sit home and care for their children. They do this, by the way, in Finland and Norway. So it’s not unheard of. But right now the incentives are tilted towards pushing everyone back to work as quickly as possible.
FP: You propose that a more family-friendly policy would be a sequential approach to mixing career and family where the woman would stay home for a period of time taking care of her family and then go back to work full time. Why do you think family policies currently do not support these sorts of sequential approaches?
NG: The big emphasis on family policy today is to provide for care for children. So there’s no sequence. There’s have a child, stay home for three or four months and get back to work. The current policies are, so they’re based on the male model, and they argue to work as long as you can. And spend as little time as possible raising the children.
FP: This has been an interview with Neil Gilbert. I’m Holly Fox from Familienpolitik.
Loading ...
Very interesting Interview, thank you Holly! Now I sort of understand what my dad means by saying that “all these policies discussed in Germany to increase the birthrate are just a product of neoliberal strategies”.
Except that he seems to believe that we shouldn’t do anything about it at all, and that society will simply get older, why not.
Mr. Gilbert wrote “if the government is going to subsidize daycare for a huge portion of the population that wants to go back to work, they should then offer the mothers who don’t want to go back to work a homecare allowance to sit home and care for their children. They do this, by the way, in Finland and Norway”
They definately do it right now in France, I also believe that family law here means FAMILY law and is not meant for the market. I’d love to live here with a family but not to found a business, I’m certain about that.
I have never seen one of my collegues because she had her child months before I came and stays at home for a year or so on 60% or 70% of her wage. She’s been replaced by somebody else, who’s got her child a month after I arrived here, and she’s already coming back tomorrow to work.
What a crazy organisation for an employer to make (we had somebody replace somebody, that replaces somebody who had her child, because she got her child too, but know she’s coming back until the original employee comes back..) and what a great place to have a family. Anyone seen the latest Michal Moore? Yeah he’s over exaggerating when it comes to France, but what he shows about the services for familys seems to be close to reality.
We shouldn’t forget, that in the end of course the family policies here are also market friendly but simply because they’re farsighted and work in the long-term.
When we don’t have any young professionals anymore in Italy and Germany, because our birthrate is still dropping right now, businesses will certainly be in trouble.
Sorry for this entry, my english is usually better but I’m tired and waiting for Holly to come back from editing her article :-).
“Your comment is awaiting moderation.”
You’re censoring the comments in your Blog before releasing them online? Seems like an odd thing to do for a liberal journalist. Or is it necessary due to spam?
[...] after child subsidies are instituted. I blogged about Germany’s supposedly successful program here. However, sociologist and author Neil Gilbert, who I interviewed here, claims [...]