Sweden’s Presidency of the Nordic Council of Ministers has made part
time work a priority issue. It has taken the shape of a two-stage
rocket; the first stage was a comparative study of how the Nordic
pension systems work. It would map the consequences for women who
choose to work part time for periods of their working lives.
When the report was presented during a Stockholm conference hosted
by NIKK (Nordic Information on Gender) the result was surprising: in
Denmark and Norway the effect is small, because the pension systems
have been changed so that wage earners with no children subsidise part
time working women’s pensions. They get 98 to 99 percent of the pension
they would have had if they had stayed in full time employment. In the
other Nordic countries, where no such subsidy system exists, the effect
was no larger than a six percent fall in pension pay.
But we shouldn’t conclude that the challenges of part time work have
gone away. The only thing this report shows is that it is not the
pension system that needs changing — at least not in Denmark and
Norway. Part time work has many other consequences, including the fact
that part time workers are less likely to take further education
compared to people working full time. That means they fall behind on
pay and as a result get lower pensions.
In 2013 Swedish women will take home a pension which is only 65
percent that of men, and the situation is similar in the other Nordic
countries.
The second stage seeks to find out why women work part time. That
task went to Oslo’s Work Research Institute, which presents its result
on 5 November next year when Iceland takes on the Presidency of the
Council of Ministers.
Some of the dilemmas women face are highlighted in our story about a
part time working pre-school teacher in Denmark, Dorte Nielsen. She
chose to reduce her working week from 37 to 30 hours to have the energy
to stay in her job. But the resulting tight personal economy forced her
and her husband to take on a Sunday cleaning job.
It might seem paradoxical to take on an extra job in order to not
have to work full time. But it was a job she did alongside her husband
and in a different environment from the pre-school.
It is one example that reality is always more complex than the
examples which researchers must use in order to make their
comparisons.
