Gøsta Esping-Andersen deserves congratulations for turning his attention to what he calls “the (unfinished) revolution of women’s roles”. Even better, he recognizes that many – perhaps most – of the core crises facing post-industrial societies stem from a reluctance to fully acknowledge and address the changes in women’s lives that have swept over Europe and North America in the last several decades. In The Incomplete Revolution, his goal is to delineate these challenges and use them as a springboard for the necessary needed policy responses. The book’s intensity and attention to detail make a compelling case for more gender egalitarian policies, although many readers – myself included– will also take issue with some of the core arguments made (or omitted) in reaching this conclusion.
The Incomplete Revolution analyzes how women’s “shift from homemaker to a lifetime dedication to employment” creates new social inequalities and, to use one of Esping-Andersen’s preferred terms, “disequilibria”. While recognizing that women’s growing commitment to paid work has beneficial consequences, he argues that it has also produced some woeful unintended consequences. These include a decline in maternity, especially among middle-class women who postpone and limit childbearing in order to pursue jobs and careers; a growing class divide, fueled in his view by a preference for marital homogamy among high-earning women and men; and tensions between the generations, as declining fertility rates yield fewer workers to support a large and longer lived aged population. Pointing to a complex mix of auspicious and worrying consequences, he concludes that “women are spearheading a new social order... (but) the more incomplete the revolution, the greater are the inequalities in its wake” (p. 168).
To Esping-Andersen’s great credit, he recognizes that we cannot and should not go backwards; the only reasonable, humane, and just response is to complete the revolution that women have begun. Following in the tradition of his earlier work, he also sees the welfare state as the only institution capable of accomplishing this task. How? By providing women with supports, such as childcare and maternity leave, that help them reconcile work and motherhood; by investing in children, especially pre-school children, to help improve the life chances of those born into poorer families; and by restructuring retirement and pension systems to enhance fairness across the generations.
This argument has considerable strengths. It recognizes the benefits that women’s employment has brought to women, families, and societies. Instead of the frequent – and empirically unsupported – lament that employed mothers place their children at risk, Esping-Andersen points to a host of non-economic as well as economic benefits that arise when women are engaged in the world of work. He also highlights the intensifying class inequities and life course shifts that have emerged alongside changes in women’s lives.
Most importantly, Esping-Andersen places the state at the front and center, declaring that “welfare state adaptation (is) a precondition for the female revolution to succeed” (p. 15). He makes this case with pointed cross-national comparisons showing how countries that resist egalitarian policies prompt a silent rebellion among women, who avoid marriage and motherhood rather than surrendering their autonomy. Far from endangering families, Esping-Anderson shows how state support for women’s employment is essential for contemporary families and societies to thrive. As he puts it, “family well-being in modern society presupposes defamilialization” (p. 104). The right question, he concludes, “is not whether we can afford more welfare spending, because that will happen anyway... but who will be the winners and losers” (p. 110).
In arriving at this trenchant conclusion, however, Esping-Anderson makes some dubious assumptions about matters that remain very much open to debate. For example, while The Incomplete Revolution considers many aspects of “the female revolution”, it has much less to say about the social changes in “gender” that permeate contemporary institutions and affect everyone, including men. Revolutions, by definition, involve alterations in relationships among social groups, yet Esping-Anderson seems to assume that women are destined to want children more than men and to remain overwhelmingly responsible for their care. He overlooks the mounting research showing that men’s preferences and strategies are also socially structured and subject to change. To take just one national case, US studies using qualitative and time-use data have consistently documented a notable increase in American men’s parental involvement as new generations face pressures and incentives to participate in child care. Even more curiously, Esping-Andersen underplays the role that social policies can play in this process. When countries such as Sweden, Norway, and Iceland adopted a “use it or lose it” policy for paternal leaves, they significantly – and some might say dramatically – increased the amount of leave time that fathers take.
Esping-Andersen also assumes that early childhood environments largely determine later life outcomes, boldly asserting that “there is now a general consensus that the really important mechanisms of social inheritance lie buried in the preschool ages” (p. 120). Whose consensus is this? It does not include the many scholars of inequality who find that such social-structural factors as educational and occupational opportunities, economic policies, and work-family options have a strong influence on adult outcomes. Recent studies of the US stratification system, for example, show that income inequality has grown in recent decades despite the substantial rise in the number and share of college-educated individuals. Ignoring how adolescent and adult opportunity structures shape life chances leaves little room to consider the variety of ways in which welfare states can foster more egalitarian outcomes in the workplace and the home.
Perhaps most perplexing, The Incomplete Revolution argues that women’s quest for gender equality has intensified class inequality. Using the logic of assortative mating, Esping-Anderson assumes that this egalitarian pursuit has been confined to middle-class women, who choose high-earning partners and thus heighten class differences by combining two ample incomes. The implication is that the gains of middle-class women harm the prospects for working-class men and women.
Yet pitting gender inequality against class inequality sets up a false conflict and a false choice. Women from working-class and poor backgrounds have also entered the labor force, and class inequality would be even greater were it not for their earnings. In a world where single motherhood is on the rise, marriages and intimate relationships are fragile, and men’s wages and job security are eroding, women’s employment has never been more important for the economic fortunes of working-class as well as middle-class families. Countless studies have found that women from all classes want and need to support themselves, whether or not they have an intimate partner. The solution is to provide all women, regardless of their past or current class position, with equal job opportunities and to provide all fathers with the supports and incentives to enable them to be responsible, equal caretakers.
The good news is that these assumptions are not necessary to make Esping-Andersen’s larger argument. On the contrary, the case for completing the gender revolution becomes even stronger if we pay more attention to the large body of scholarship on “gender” as a complex system of institutions and relationships. A more gender-sensitive lens would reveal the ways in which an incomplete revolution has left men, no less than women, confronting intractable dilemmas. A more sociological perspective would draw more attention to how the structure of adult opportunities shapes options and constrains women and men from diverse class backgrounds.
Yet The Incomplete Revolution frames the debate largely in terms used by human capital economists, who tend to see “tastes” as given rather than investigating how they are formed and change over time in response to changing social contexts. There are, for example, 17 references to Gary Becker and 6 to Catherine Hakim, who argues that women’s choices reflect “preferences” rather than the trade-offs required by institutional arrangements. In contrast, with a few exceptions, references to the core ideas and debates among contemporary gender scholars (whether or not they are self-identified feminists) are either oversimplified or notable by their absence. Across the disciplinary spectrum, these analysts have shown how the institution of gender poses structural and cultural contradictions and intersects with other forms of inequality. Closer attention to their empirical and theoretical work would have enriched the analysis of our current conundrums and the political options for resolving them.
The Incomplete Revolution nevertheless makes an important and provocative contribution. It is difficult to overstate the significance and timeliness of its core idea: that our best hope for the future is to complete the gender revolution that is inexorably reshaping life in the 21st century. My hope is that the book will inspire a serious debate that pushes forward the social movements and social policies required to accomplish this urgently needed task.
