Btw,since we're talking about NL, I was looking at some statistical report about Luxembourg and there were some comparisons with other EU countries, I was really shocked to see that something like 75% of women in NL work part time!? How come? I always imagined NL as a kind of Sweden but then I realized you guys have exorbitant childcare prices, you pay for your health insurance, you even pay for universities...what the heck do you get for all the taxes then?
I lived in Austria, Sweden and now Luxembourg and it seems that these countries are actually among the best when it comes to what the state provides for you so I always just assumed that it's the EU norm...but it seems I was just really good (or rather lucky) at picking my countries.
If you ask that on the street, people will say: we bailed out all those lazy Greeks, Spanish, Irish, Portugese and all the banks in Europe. ( I know that's not a fair representation of the facts, but that's what the average person thinks: we are paying and working so everyone else in Europe can sit on their backsides enjoying the sun)
People have this view of the Netherlands being super tolerant and liberal. Actually, we have a very strong calvinistic heritage and it took a lot more time for gender equality to reach our country. These days, it's normal for women to work, but I'm 27 and when I grew up, very few mothers worked. Maybe two or three mums of the kids in my class worked, and my mother was married so it was a bit of a disgrace.
It's not like that anymore, but it is still very much frowned upon for a mother to work fulltime. Most women will work anywhere from 20 to 30 hours a week. As a result, there are a lot of part time positions available, especially in jobs geared mostly towards women: admin, beauty, nursing, teaching. It's hard to find a fulltime position in some of these fields. You start by taking on a parttime job and if you're lucky you might get more hours at some point in the future. Employers are also hesistant to give fulltime jobs, especially management positions, to young women, because it's expected that once you get married and have children you will scale back to parttime. It's a legal right to request parttime work, they don't want to get stuck with a manager who works 2 days a week. It's a complicated thing: it's great that there's a real option to work parttime for most people. I can imagine in certain seasons of life parttime work is very good for people (young parents, for example). I have a chronic illness and for me it means I can find a well-paying parttime position.
On the other hand, I do feel that women are held back by this big cultural norm that you shouldn't work fulltime. Men generally expect women to do most of the housework, schools are underfunded and rely on volunteering mothers for all sorts of activities, the care for the elderly is underfunded and relies on women to take care of elderly relatives and neighbours. If you are a career-minded woman it's much harder to get into a management position. I know women who write on their CV that they are voluntarily childless for this reason.
How do people fund this all? We go into a lot of debt. We are upset that the IMF keeps warning us about the high levels of private debts, but it's a huge problem. You don't need a downpayment for a mortgage - on the contrary, it used to be common to borrow 106% of the value of the property so you had money for the closing costs as well. This has now been scaled back to 100% and people are extremely upset about that. People can legally spend about 30% of their family income on their mortgage and most people choose to buy the most expensive home they can buy. With the current low interest rates and 30-year mortgages being the most common, it means people can spend a lot of money on a home and we are in a massive housing bubble. Mortgage interest is deductible too. We bought a home when we were 24 and 28. We bought a super cheap home (€79.500) in need of renovation in a bad neighbourhood. Our original mortgage was about 97% of the property value. The rest of the price + the closing costs were paid from our savings account. We changed lenders because the first lender was super suspicious about us, they were convinced the €20.000 in our savings account must be drugs money or something. We didn't get an inheritance, how else do young people get so wealthy?
The same goes for student loans. The interest rates are super low, you can pay back in 30 years, they're not registered anywhere formally so a mortgage lender can't even check if you're honest about your loans. You pay back by income and if you've paid in for 30 years, the outstanding balance is forgiven.
Childcare, healthcare and rent can get relatively expensive (to European standards) so they've invented childcare and healthcare and rent benefits that nearly everyone can claim. It would be much easier if they just made it all a lot cheaper, but as these services are 100% privatized the government can't influence the price levels. Instead they distribute billions of benefits and making a huge admin mess. You get a monthly benefit and at the end of the year they check if they gave you the right amount. If they paid too much, you have to pay it back. The system is very complex, so no one really knows if they're entitled to what they get monthly, it's always a surprise until you get that letter. They can claim back benefits from up to 5 years in the past so it happens that you get a bill for something that happened years ago and you just pay it back in installments to get rid of it. This month, I'm paying back the last remaining bit of rent benefit that I received, apparantly unjustified, in 2014.
The insane debt levels people have and the austerity policies of our government caused the country to recover only very slowly from the 2008 crisis. We've been in recovery for about 2 years now and the housing bubble is getting so extreme that I'm very worried about a new crisis coming up soon. We look rich on the outside, but there's a huge economic mess below the surface.