What proportion of mothers work in different countries?

Sakura Enviable childcare system.

I think in Germany there is still quite a big cultural difference between east and west. For example in Bavaria children start kindergarten when they're 3, there's limited childcare for under 3s and the cultural expectation is much more that there will be a mother at home. In Berlin on the other hand there are lots of (relatively) cheap daycare places for babies upwards, all day schools and after school clubs. Lots of women seem to return to work full time.

I wish we had childcare like that here in the uk!

Japan is strange.
There is an excellent, well-funded and subsidised daycare system here. Your first child goes into daycare with gov help, the second child is half price, and the third child is free !!
There's a 'sick' nursery for days your child is sick and can't put them in the normal nursery. THere are night nurseries for mothers who work evenings and nights. It's very cheap. If you're pregnant or have a newborn you can put your child in nursery for the same price as if you were working FT.
In other words it's a highly subsidized system. There are also lots of 'drop-in' services where you can drop your child off for 4 hours or the day for about 7 pounds.

Anyway.

Despite this, most mothers don't or won't work. It's difficult for women to get ahead in the workplace, but it's the chicken and the egg. They won't work, so they aren't going to get ahead in the workplace IYSWIM.
There's lots of cultural reason why women won't work.
I've noticed that women who do want to work can get on quite well, however. They run businesses, become doctors, money brokers. Anything really. It's just that a lot of them seem to choose not to. They have a lot of family obligations, though esp the extended family.

salizchap.

Thanks, gingercat. Interesting that they've cut maternity leave to 2 years. The deficit-cutting government that's just been elected here (well, it's not in place yet but we're told it will bes soon...) seems minded to leave the system at a choice of 2,3 or 4 here, which is very expensive. I know Hungary is more up against it, but still.

salizchap That is simply awful!

I don;t know if it has changed much in the last 4 years, but when I was living in Spain, there was a shortage of nurseries, I had a hell of a job to get DS into one. It wasn't very cheap though. I managed to get a FT job in a factory, but the nursery fees took at least a third of my wages. After paying that and my rent I had barely enough to feed us on. Most mums work, but rely on GP for childcare. There is no welfare state, so lone parents have to live with grandparents or leave children in a 'casa de acojida', ie; care. Most businesses contract workers through ETT'S (empresas de trabajo temporal=temping agencies), and they take you on for a few days, getting a subvention from the state for employing an unemployed person, then they lay you off with no notice and employ someone else and get another paycheck from the state. I got layed off after a month working for H&M in their warehouse in Barcelona. I had to take a day off to look after my DS when he had sickness and diarrhoa, they called me the next morning and told me I wasn't needed any more. I was annoyed because our line manager was a Swede, from a country with some of the toughest employment protection laws in the world! She knew I was a mother, and just left me in deep financial trouble. I couldn't get another job and had to come back to the UK or give my son up to foster care.

The moral of the story; Spain has one of the lowest birth rates in The EU.

Hungary is fairly similar to the Czech Republic. No part-time jobs. Maternity leave was 3 years, but was recently cut back to 2 years. Most (career) women would go back to work after 1 year, because real high-powered jobs do not really wait.

The long maternity leave had a real negative effect on pensions, as older women really struggled to qualify for pension. I think my Mom had to have 35 years of work (and only one kid), and she had to work to an older age than my Dad. Nowadays hopefully maternity leave qualifies you for pension.

If you have 3 kids under 18 and the youngest is under 8, you can opt to be a "mother as a main employment". The state pays you about a £100 a month. I am not sure about the current amounts, as I do not know many people who went down this route.

Nurseries are few and far between and very expensive. Not as dear as in the UK though. I have just realised that we can afford private school for DS, as private school is cheaper than nursery .

My grandmas were both working in agriculture, so never officially worked or qualified for pension. They always worked on the fields, had phenomenal number of kids, then died relatively young.

Actually Emy72, in Northern Italy the majority of families use nurseries for the under 3s, as they are generally excellent (better than a nanny, imho).
In central/southern Italy you are right, there aren't many.

Both my grandmothers were firmly working class and kept on working, even after the end of ww2.

It is true that very generally speaking in Italy it is the well off mums that go back to work.

I think this is a cultural thing, on top of the obvious, ie the ability to afford a nanny, for example (no childcare really available for under 3s that you would want to use anyway - esp in the South/Centre).

My father's mum was upper class and despite having married at 18 and had 5 children she had a live in nanny and a housekeeper and worked all her life. She was a script writer, violinist and a painter. She also directed a big theatre in central Rome. This was very normal in her circles.

My maternal grandma was working class and had 4 children and LEFT work when she got married. She worked in a factory. She was at home rearing her kids, despite having her mother live with her. This was the norm in her world.

I don't think things have changed that much from that scenario tbh.....except that women hardly have any children now lol xx

Probably not at all relevant to you as you are obviously looking for comparisions to the UK but in the Caribbean (I have lived in two countries here) most mothers work, or at least try to work.

Mostly because there are not so many "nuclear" families, so women have to work to support their chidren. Also no benefits system.

Oh it's pointless to go on really because no comparision at all to the "west"!

MmeLindt - possibly my circle is not a fair sample because I either know mums who work with me or else know them from my daughter's daycare, where the children wouldn't be unless their mothers were working. I guess I just don't meet the SAHMs.

Couldn't find any official statistics (possibly because too lazy to search in German) but was reminded of the horrifying fact that Switzerland had no obligatory maternity benefit until 2005.

Really Heading4Home? Most of the mums I know in Switzerland don't work. Maybe that is just the expat wives though.

I guess it does depend a bit on the cost of living, which is really expensive here. If we were paying for our own accommodation instead of having it covered by DH's work, then I would have to go back to work. We could not afford to live here otherwise.

I think a fair few of the local mums work, I certainly see them in smart clothes at school pick up times.

I don't know the official statistics for Switzerland, but I do know that ALL mothers I know work. Most full time as part-time work is hard to find. Of course, the mothers I know are mostly non-Swiss.

Maternity leave here is legally 14 weeks, but my company "generously" gives 2 weeks before the due date and 16 weeks after the birth. After that it is expected that you will go back full time.

Will try and find out some concrete numbers later if you like.

Yes, there isn't one in my town. 60,000 inhabitants.

Bucharest, it's only our "dear" government ( ) who loves to label all italian teachers as lazy (and possibly comunist) scroungers .

Reading the statistics on the presence of state funded nurseries for the under 3s is depressing, as in the south the rate is very minimal.

In romania, it seems that most mother go back to work. there is no affordable child care. And school start at 7. But the grandparents, teenage sisters,... take care of the children or there is work/SAH shifts in the entire familly. (often the GP still work too). The most well off, have also their mums or MILs to care for the children or nannies (I am not sure all of them are working though or just delegating )
In France the % of SAHM is very low. Child care is affordable, maternity leave is not long and not very good, and it is a cultural no no not to return to work. I have trouble with my familly accepting me as a SAHM after a phD and 10 years of international research! Even when I tell them that I would have to pay to go to work as the salary I would get wouldn't cover the child care, they don't see why I wouldn't (btw we can't afford it)

and for the over-3s, preschool hours are typically 8-4, although some children do half days.

re. part-time jobs in the Czech Republic - it may be that there's little demand for them, so it could be a chicken-and-egg thing.

This huuuge emphasis on the magical age of 3 (despite the recent change in the law) means that before 3, mothers are almost all at home (although self-employed people often work part-time - as I did) but over the age of 3 there's a feeling that it's fine to work full-time, in fact you probably want to work full time to make up for loss of earnings before.

Certainly by school age, the before/after school club is open from 6.30 am to 5.30 pm.

I agree with Franke's assesment of Germany.

Maternity leave is 6 weeks prior and 8 weeks after birth and the employer is obliged to keep the job open for 3 years.

A lot of women I know went back to work for a short time when their first child was between 2 and 3yo, long enough to be eligible for Elterngeld (67% of salary, up to €1800 monthly for 14mths) then got pregnant again.

Elterngeld was supposed to tempt professional women to give up their jobs and have DC.

Many German women go back to work part time or open their own business, doing translation, selling craftwork, jewelery etc.

In the south of Italy (although things have changed in the 15 years I've been here, slightly) it seems strange (to those of us with a northern European mindset possibly) to find that it is precisely those women from the more well-off families, with a good education and training behind them, who do work, while the less well off don't.

My own dp (who I am emancipating, slowly but slowly (no typo intended ) can often be heard to say...."oh, yes, I know that teacher so and so....very rich family, she doesn't need to work" etc.

The less well off, less highly trained/skilled whatever, will simply wait and become housewives, for less simplistic reasons, I think, than the simple Stepfordy belief that a woman's place is in the home, (although undoubtedly there is a lot of that as well, in my dp's parents' generation certainly)

Wages are so low down here, and state childcare only provided generally from the age of 3, that I suppose women who are going to earn about £250 a month (the going rate down here for a secretary-type job in a private firm) just aren't going to do it, because it's not worth it financially.

I'm probably the opposite of Franca down here, in that I don't know anybody who didn't stop working after the birth of their children, apart from the women I talked about above, teachers, doctors etc. (who can all afford the babysitter/cleaner team of helpers etc)

A positive thing to come out of this though is that I have found myself much happier with dd's teachers than I imagined I would, precisely because they are truly dedicated teachers who are doing the job because they love it, not because they need the money!

Ah another thing about Italy.

We have a very generous maternity leave legislation. Excellent you'd say. But many companies therefore try to avoid offering permanent jobs to women in their early 30s. I kid you not.

I think lots of German mothers work part-time. Maternity benefits here are generous compared to the UK so women are able to hold on to their jobs for longer before deciding whether to go back or not, full-time or part-time. There is a serious issue here with dropping birth-rate and the government is desperately trying to incentivise people to have more children. It seems to me though that the ones who procreate more are unemployable foreigners like me

What I would say is that the underlying attitude here is that mum stays home to child-rear and ends up doing this combined with a nice little part-time job. I know few mothers here, German or otherwise, who work full-time. The other odd thing is that up to age 6 or so, most kids get a full-day place in Kindergarten, then from 6 they go to Primary School which finishes at midday

Have a look here.

Eurostat should also have some statistics on this.