I used to have one boyfriend who was my first boyfriend, a charming Swiss guy. We didn’t differ much in our opinions and “penchants” except for one thing: are woman “allowed” to work full-time (or almost) and to have a family at the same time?
Of course! Being somehow French, it seemed natural to do both at the same time. I never thought about choosing a particular job according to the degree of potential family compatibility. I’ve always seen my mother working full-time and I don’t have the feeling that my personal development suffered much from that. But, obviously, if you’ve been raised in a different family constellation, you also see things differently. That’s it.
And I thought that the reason for that is obvious: in Switzerland, public services for families are rather pre-historic and due to some strange tax regulation, it’s an economic advantage if only one of both works. In France, you pay way more taxes, but, on the counterpart, public services are present, similar to Scandinavian countries; which allows women to combine a professional and a family life if they want to. If not, they are somehow punished because they have to pay a lot of taxes but cannot fully profit from existing social structures.
However, according to a recent study by the economist Michelle Rendall, the cultural aspect seems as much important as the economic factor (if not more). This is illustrated in the following example. While in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, woman prefer not to work while raising their children (similar to the situation existing in Germany despite higher taxes and social structures that are better than Switzerland but much less advanced than France or Sweden), the situation looks completely different in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. There, the situation resembles the one observed in France, namely that the majority of mothers do also work. Why? It’s tempting to speculate that it’s because working mothers are socially well accepted and considered. No word such as “Rabenmutter” exists in other languages than German. Once more, I realized that we’re highly culturally determined.