Social Investment or Gender Equality? Aims, Instruments and Outcomes of Parental Leave Regulations in Germany and Sweden

Since the 1990s, investive social policy became one of the guiding principles of the “new welfare state”. From a gender perspective, this social policy shift goes along with increased gender awareness. Feminists criticize this investive approach for being “too instrumental” and “too uni-dimensional” by focusing mainly on female employment and reconciliation of work and family. In this Paper, recent family policy reforms in Germany and Sweden are scrutinized through the lens of this social policy shift. We have chosen two countries for our comparison with different regime arrangements. While Germany is the prototype of a conservative welfare state with a (modernized) male breadwinner model, Sweden belongs to the social democratic welfare states with a two earner/carer model. We analyse if recent reforms in parental leave and cash for care schemes in Germany and Sweden are shaped by the social investment and/or by the gender equality paradigm and if the two countries are converging or remaining different in relation to aims policy instruments, and outcomes regarding the family policies. Our analysis shows that, despite the great differences in welfare legacy, Germany and Sweden have today very similar parental insurances which follow a mixture of the gender-equality and social investment paradigm. Nonetheless, when the aims of recent reforms are discussed in parliament, Swedish politicians refer much more clearly to the gender equality paradigm, while German politicians refer to the social investment paradigm. In both countries recent reforms have led to a redistribution of paid and unpaid work between men and women, even if Sweden has come much further in this regard. To what extent this is just caused by Germany reforming its parental insurance much later, or if it is an expression of the remaining strong stand of the male-breadwinner ideology can only time tell (co-author: Hanne Martinek)