Europe’s fiscal future is in trouble for the simple reason that people get older. As working-age populations shrink and the number of pensioners rise, economic growth and public debt will come under strain. The European Union succeeded in overhauling its fiscal rules to focus more on long-term success than short-term bean counting. Now it needs to get its workforce in gear.
Immigration and babies alone won’t make a big enough difference to turn the tide. Raising retirement ages would help, but will be politically difficult. However, there’s one change that could have a huge impact and wouldn’t even need tax money to work: getting men to do more housework.
Women’s equality requires a cultural shift about who does stuff in everyday life, specifically who is responsible for what happens at home. Women in heterosexual households do much more housework than their partners, even when they are the primary breadwinners. Men routinely overestimate their contributions. This imbalance makes it harder for women to succeed at work, and the whole economy suffers.
After all, companies thrive when women climb the pay scales. Firms with the best balance of women and men had an annual return on assets that was 29 percent higher than companies with the worst gender-diversity track record, according to a 2023 BlackRock study. Companies with more women in middle management also outperformed.
Relegated to the Footnotes
This ought to be big news for a Europe that is increasingly preoccupied with how it is falling behind. And yet women’s inclusion tends to be relegated to the footnotes. Mario Draghi’s new magnum opus on how to make the EU more competitive doesn’t mention the housework gap until page 263 of his 328-page report. The doorstop is sprinkled with a handful of calls to increase women’s labor market participation, with sensible recommendations like increasing childcare options. But its talk of workforce activation doesn’t dig deeper into why the EU is leaving top talent on the shelf.
Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s efforts to form a gender-balanced European Commission for her second mandate show how quickly broad calls for inclusion can devolve into hostility when the time comes to put those principles into practice. EU member states largely declined to offer much diversity in their picks for Brussels jobs, with women making up just 22 percent of initial commissioner candidates. Von der Leyen strongarmed her base into boosting that number to 40 percent, but it’s still unequal and the slate has yet to win approval from the European Parliament.
It's not enough for von der Leyen herself to succeed at the top of the EU executive. As legal scholar Joan Williams has written, high-performing women have to prove themselves again and again to be fit for purpose, setting a higher bar for von der Leyen than for her equally political predecessors Jean-Claude Juncker or José Manuel Barroso.
The gender wage gap persists—men in the EU outearn women by about 13 percent, as of 2021. Digging deeper into European Commission numbers, the gender overall earnings gap stood at 37 percent in 2018, and looking at the combined impact of the average hourly earnings, the monthly average of the number of hours paid, and the employment rate, it stood at 36.7 percent in 2018. The commission notes that women spend more time on unpaid work than their male counterparts, but overall say that “the far largest part of the gender pay gap remains unexplained in the EU.”
Held Back by Housework
Or maybe it’s not that hard to explain. Economist Claudia Goldin won the 2023 Nobel Prize in economics for her work showing that women’s careers are held back by domestic responsibilities, even when the workplace is open to using their talents. “The point quite clearly is that study after study shows that the biggest differences between men and women, particularly those who have college degrees and beyond, is that women tend to do more on the home front, be the individual who’s on call at home, and men tend not to be the individual on call at home,” she said in a 2022 interview.
The data are indeed inexorable. Employed European women spend 2.3 hours a day on housework compared to 1.6 for employed men, according to the European Institute for Gender Equity. The institute’s 2021 survey found that 91 percent of women with children spent time on child care every day, compared to about 30 percent for fathers, with women also putting in more time cooking and cleaning. Since 2016, the gap between men and women’s home labors has narrowed—because women are doing less, not because men are doing more.
These statistics and patterns are well known, yet surprisingly slippery. The confines of the gender binary, itself a social construct, run deep. In serious conversations about the economy, these topics too often invite evasive responses that tend to fall into four categories. The first is to make a joke or a dismissal like “OK Barbie,” invoking the 2023 blockbuster movie where an impassioned speech from one woman to another highlights societal binds. The subtext here is that this is a conversation for women only, not part of the broader policy debate.
A second common reaction privileges feelings over fact—the idea that it cannot be true that women don’t have enough opportunity at work because there exist prominent individuals who get lots of public recognition. This should be easy to disprove—if it were true that being a woman made someone more likely to get a top job, Europe’s highest circles wouldn’t be full of pictures like this. And yet studies show that people persistently overestimate women’s participation in professional circles. In a 2015 study, top business leaders guessed women chief executives were more than 20 percent of the total—the real number was about 8 percent.
A third kind of pushback is more insidious: the idea that because not all women experience discrimination in all situations, the problem must not be that bad. Successful women can benefit individually from staying clear of the whole debate, and they may find personal gain in speaking as if such structural barriers had never applied to them. That doesn’t mean the structural barriers are not there.
The fourth common response is the one that—if it changed—would make the biggest difference for the European economy. It’s the instinctive reaction of well-meaning men to say something like, “Yes, this is a problem, but fortunately I don’t contribute to it.” This one comes up not just at the individual level, but also as a way to excuse whole societies.
Sweden, for example, regularly comes in first among its EU peers when it comes to gender parity. Yet even this top performer is no exception to the inequities on the second shift. “Women still largely take responsibility for unpaid household and care work,” according to the Swedish Gender Equality Agency. Even when the state tries to make up the difference, as with paid parental leave, women use 61 percent of the total benefit compared to just 39 percent for men, with women more likely to take unpaid leave in addition.
Fathers’ paid caregiving is one of the more highly touted global ideas for getting men to do their fair share. The EU’s work-life balance directive requires employers to offer a minimum 10 days of paternity leave, with up to four months available paid leave for either parent, and some countries and industries have gone much further. Yet even that can be a double-edged sword.
Male economics professors were almost 20 percent more likely to get tenure if they benefited from a year of “clock stopping” after their babies were born, while women in the same position saw their tenure prospects drop 22 percent, according to a study in the American Economic Review. That’s because the men didn’t use their parental furlough to focus on their home life, as “men tend to use the leave period as a time to work whereas women tend to spend it caring for their child.”
“How Do We Get Men to Care”
Culture is the only way this is going to change, and that may have to happen one household at a time. As the writer Amanda Montei said, “How do we get men to care”?
Maybe bond markets can help make the argument. EU countries are going to see their debt-to-GDP ratios severely strained by demographic changes in coming decades, according to a new Bruegel study. Unexpected developments for fertility, immigration, life expectancy, and care costs could make the situation worse. So could worse-than-forecast productivity.
But if productivity goes in the other direction—if countries can get more of their working-age populations off the sidelines and contributing at the top of their respective games—the belt-tightening needed to make this debt sustainable won’t need to be so bad. Surely that’s worth doing a few more dishes. Even for men.
Rebecca Christie is INTERNATIONALE POLITIK QUARTERLY’s Brussels columnist and a senior fellow at Bruegel, the economic think tank.
