Part of the reason is that Dutch women were relative latecomers to the labour market. Compared with other countries, few men had to leave to fight in the world wars of the 20th century, with the result that women did not labour in factories as they did in America and Britain. Thanks to the country's wealth, a dual income was often not a necessity for a comfortable life. And Dutch politics was dominated by Christian values until the 1980s: the focus was mainly on providing state aid (implicit subsidies in the fiscal system) so that women could stay at home with children.
This changed in the late 1980s, when the state realised that it would be a good idea to mobilise women into the job market. But the cultural conviction that families still needed mothers home for tea-time prevailed, and thus the state worked closely with employers to ensure that the new part-time jobs would enjoy similar legal positions to their full-time equivalents. This has, to an extent, been continued: in 2000 the right for women and men to ask for a job to be part-time was written into law. But Ronald Dekker, a labour economist at Tilburg University, thinks this law is a confirmation of existing practice and therefore largely symbolic, only necessary for certain “archaic industries”. Instead, he reckons the high prevalence of part-time jobs is largely down to the wide availability of good quality, well-paid “first tier” part-time jobs in the Netherlands: jobs often considered inferior in many other countries.
Whether part-time work is good for emancipation is questionable. Today, perhaps because part-time work is the norm, women in the Netherlands have a relatively high labour-force participation rate. However, the Netherlands’ record for getting women into top management roles is dire. The prevalence of part-time work seems to play a role: once you strip out part-timers, women make it into management roles nearly as often as men, according to the CBS (the main statistics agency in the Netherlands) although that doesn't include top management. The Dutch government has said that by next year 30% of executive board positions should be held by women, but that may prove excessively optimistic; the level is currently just 6%, according to Mijntje Luckerath, an academic at Tilburg University, who also blames old-fashioned selection processes. And not all part-timers are pleased with their set up: before the financial crisis, fewer than 10% of Dutch part-timers wished they were employed full time; this has risen to nearly 25%. This percentage is still much lower than in other EU countries, but it is a striking rise.