Oesch, Daniel

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Book ReviewGøsta Esping-Andersen: TheIncomplete Revolution: Adaptingto Women’s New RolesCambridge: Polity Press, 2009, 214 pp.In contrast to what the title suggests, this book is notprimarily about politics and gender, but about socialinequality and the welfare state. At first glance, thisvolume seems to be little different from Esping-Andersen’s earlier books. Yet it is, and the main noveltyconcerns the author’s effort to bring in demography inorder to understand how inequalities accumulate overthe life course. The book starts out with the argumentthat research on income inequality has exaggerated theinfluence of globalization and technology, all the whileneglecting the impact of massive shifts in demography.These shifts primarily relate to women’s changingbehaviour with respect to education, marriage, family,domestic work, and career dedication. In Esping-Andersen’s words, we have experienced nothing lessthan a ‘female revolution’ as women’s life course hasbecome increasingly masculinized. Not only is it the casethat new cohorts of women increasingly embrace alifelong commitment to employment. The transform-ation also spills over to decisions regarding marriage—couples becoming increasingly similar in terms of humancapital—, fertility and the domestic sphere, wherewomen have significantly reduced and men have littleby little increased their investment in home production.However, the ‘revolutionary’ change in women’s roleis still incomplete and contemporary societies thus are,according to Esping-Andersen, suspended between twoequilibria. A first equilibrium crystallizes around thetraditional nuclear family with the male as the bread-winner and the female as the homemaker. Post-warclassics considered this model of strong gender special-ization as the End of History: for Talcott Parsons it wasthe maturation of the modernization process, for GaryBecker the most efficient organization of family welfare.Yet, this seemingly stable arrangement has come underpressure from a rival model: Women’s quest for highereducation, economic autonomy, and life-time dedicationto paid work has profoundly reshaped family life andgiven rise to what Esping-Andersen calls the ‘gender-equality equilibrium’. Its emergence is illustrated, on theone hand, by women’s improved educational attainmentand increasing labour market attachment, and on theother by husbands’ growing contribution to housework.The gender-equality equilibrium is steadily expandingin the Western World. Yet Esping-Andersen’s analysis oftime use and income data recalls that it is far from beingdominant. The post-war male–breadwinner, female–housewife equilibrium continues to describe the life ofabout a third of Americans and Southern Europeans andperhaps a tenth of Scandinavians. Crucially, a largefraction of people falls in-between the two equilibria.While they have left behind the Ancien Re´gime ofclear-cut gender division, they have not yet fullyembraced a model of dual careers and shared homeproduction. Accordingly, they are caught in an unstableequilibrium, which is not only based on unclearnormative standards but also associated with suboptimaloutcomes, among others much lower actual than desiredfertility. More importantly, and this is the book’s keyargument, as long as the transformation towards genderequality is incomplete, this very process is bound toincrease inequalities.Why should the evolution towards greater genderequality lead to social polarization? The reason is thatthe dual-career norm has primarily been adopted bywomen from the privileged classes, making it largely a‘middle-class affair’ (p. 169). Hence, highly educatedwomen have increased their labour supply to a muchgreater degree than low-educated women since the1980s—an evolution that has significantly contributedto the rise of income inequality. In parallel, maritalsimilarity in terms of social class has grown as women inhigher grade occupations increasingly marry men em-ployed in similar high-status jobs. Not surprisingly then,these high-skilled double-earner couples race ahead ofthe rest, whereas joblessness is widespread amongcouples at the bottom of the education distribution.The female revolution may thus reduce inequalitywithin the household, but increase inequality betweenhouseholds. Worryingly, this demography-driven growthin income inequality also spills over to children’smobility prospects. Esping-Andersen shows that inequal-ity in parents’ monetary and time investment in theirchildren widened over the last decades. Time-use datafrom Denmark, Spain, and the United States suggest thathighly educated parents dedicate a fourth to a thirdmore time to their children than low-educated parents.The discrepancies in life chances thus seem to widenEuropean Sociological Review VOLUME 27 NUMBER 2 2011 288–290 288 The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.comalong a series of linked factors: family income, spendingon children, and both the quantity and quality ofparenting.This troublesome evolution calls for welfare statereform—a project whose contours Esping-Andersenoutlines in the book’s second half. The reform shouldensure that children have equal life chances and simul-taneously bridge Europe’s large gap between the desiredand the actual number of children. To achieve these twogoals, it is paramount that motherhood be reconciledwith employment in such a way as to minimize women’sloss of life-time income due to children. This impliespaid maternity-cum-parental leave with job security,generous child allowances, an individual taxation regime,and access to non-family home help for the elderly. Thecorner stone of Esping-Andersen’s reform agenda is,however, access to affordable quality childcare. Based onrecent findings that cognitive and socio-emotionalfoundations of learning are laid in early childhood,Esping-Andersen argues that the roots of unequal lifechances are buried in the pre-school ages—all the moreso because schools are ill-equipped to remedy a badstart. Accordingly, welfare states need to invest infamilies with children. This investment primarily con-sists—alongside government transfers aimed at eradicat-ing child poverty—in universal access to childcare.Esping-Andersen thus points out the paradox thatfamily well-being in modern society presupposes ‘defa-milization’: Where external welfare state arrangementshelp families to care for their children and their elderly,inter-generational ties as measured with the frequency ofinteractions between grandparents, parents, and childrenseem stronger and fathers’ time investment into theiroffspring greater.State subsidies for universal day-care coverage do notcome cheap: Denmark’s universal day-care system forchildren under six years costs an equivalent of almosttwo per cent of GDP. A frequently advocated solution isto downsize pensions in order to redistribute publicresources from the elderly towards the young. In thebook’s final chapter, Esping-Andersen convincinglyargues that this is an intellectual fallacy. To begin with,pushing a part of the retired back into poverty simplyshifts the financial burden from the state towardsfamilies. Moreover, if budget cuts also concern publicservices for the elderly, greater demand for familial carewill translate into lower female employment and henceless tax revenues. Most importantly, the warning of animpending clash between generations ignores the largeextent of intra-generational inequality: ‘death is notdemocratic: the rich live far longer than the poor andthis produces huge inequalities within each retirementgeneration’ (p. 147). Instead, Esping-Andersen proposesa series of more equitable measures to come to gripswith the costs of population ageing. More generally, heinsists that securing pensions in 2050 essentially dependson the productivity of the then active cohorts.Accordingly, ‘retirement reform must begin withbabies’ (p. 162). The idea is that investment into earlychildhood yields high returns: Quality day care and earlyschooling not only boost women’s labour supply andthus reduce child poverty. More crucially, they alsoimprove and homogenize children’s cognitive stimula-tion and educational attainment and thus raise futureproductive potential.Hence, the macro-economic costs of investing inchildren seem bearable. In contrast, the absence ofwelfare state support for children may be costly in thelong run. It not only leaves rising inequalities unchecked,but also complicates the reconciliation of motherhoodwith work. The result is not very attractive: too fewchildren, too few hours worked by women, too narrow atax base, and persisting inequalities in children’s lifechances.With The Incomplete Revolution, Esping-Andersen hasembarked on the ambitious project of bringing in thefamily to explain unequal life chances. By and large, thisenterprise is crowned with success. Three qualities of thebook are particularly noteworthy. First, there is aconsiderable amount of conceptual originality as theauthor brings together the literature from sociology,demography, and economics. Second, Esping-Andersentries to empirically support his arguments wheneverpossible; his narrative thus rests on countless statisticalanalyses of income data, time-use surveys, householdpanels, and Programme for International StudentAssessment (PISA) scores. Finally, the book strives tobe directly relevant to policy-making; hence, it lucidlyengages with ongoing political debates and, unlike manyother scholars, does so in a language easily accessible topractitioners and undergraduate students.One major criticism of this book relates to theoverwhelming weight Esping-Andersen places on earlychildhood as the crucial period when inequalities areformed. Compared with the massive effect attributed tochildcare, the long years spent in the educational systemare virtually blended out. The idea that the die ofinequality is already cast in pre-school years seems notonly unappealing from a philosophical point of view.More importantly, it also takes little note of the researchshowing the powerful effect that parents’ class has onadolescents’ educational choices independent of theirschool performance (e.g. Erikson and Jonsson, 1996).Likewise, the finding that social origin is more closelylinked with educational attainment at younger ratherthan older ages clearly suggests that schooling affectsBOOK REVIEW 289equality above and beyond the pre-school years(e.g. Blossfeld and Shavit, 1993). Yet, despite the weakcase it makes regarding educational systems, there is littledoubt that The Incomplete Revolution strongly enhancesour understanding of the making and unmaking ofunequal life chances. And last but not least, it is asurprisingly entertaining read.Daniel OeschInstitute of Social Sciences, University of Lausanne,Switzerlanddaniel.oesch@unil.chReferencesBlossfeld, H.-P. and Shavit, Y. (1993). Persisting barriers:changes in educational opportunities in thirteencountries. In Shavit, Y. and Blossfeld, H.-P. (Eds.),Persistent Inequality: Changing EducationalAttainment in Thirteen Countries. Boulder:Westview Press, pp. 1–23.Erikson, R. and Jonsson, J. (1996). Explaining classinequality in education: the swedish test case. InErikson, R. and Jonsson, J. (Eds.), Can Education BeEqualized? The Swedish Case in ComparativePerspective. Boulder: Westview Press, pp. 1–64.DOI:10.1093/esr/jcr025, available online at www.esr.oxfordjournals.orgOnline publication 15 March 2011290 BOOK REVIEW

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