Please stop doing that, comparing the USA to some fictional country called Europe to prove a point. I agree with many of your arguments, but where the author of this piece is generalizing based on anecdotes, you're generalizing based on stats. And opportunistically picking and mixing stats from different countries on top of that.
For someone who likes to throw around stats and pretend to make a scientifically based argument, what does a conclusion like "most European countries are behind the USA" even mean? Europe has countries the size of a few football fields. It has large, thinly populated countries, small, densely populated countries and everything in between.
I would really appreciate it of people would stop using this fictional Europe for their ideological political arguments about the USA.
Full disclosure: I happen to be from a country in Europe that has higher participation rates for women than the US, is not Scandinavian, doesn't have particularly strong supportive policies (better than the US, but that isn't saying much) and on top of that: despite these stats women in this country are leaving the labor force in large numbers when they get kids, which particularly shows up in a lack of women in senior leadership positions. These things vary wildly per country and culture.
There IS a place called the European Union, which tries to unify things in those regards though. Sure, the European Union is not Europe, but that's like saying "America is not the US, it's the whole continent" (that is, correct, but nobody cares, people will still use the name).
>Europe has countries the size of a few football fields. It has large, thinly populated countries, small, densely populated countries and everything in between.
So, sort of like the states? New Hampshire is not really the size or population of Texas or California. And not all of them have the same rates and policies.
Besides, he did gave listings and talked individually about different european countries.
It's not that big of a stretch to then check the aggregate, and speak of how "Europe" is doing. The European Comission does exactly this all the time.
I think that is a bad comparison. When anyone says "America", they almost always mean "USA". There are also a lot fewer cases in which most people want to talk about the Americas as a whole, and each continent tends to be denoted by South- and North-. "Europe", on the other hand, seems to always refer to the whole continent (people can disagree about where the Easternmost point is, but other than that the usage of the word is very crisp). I don't see how conflating the EU and Europe is appropriate at all, and I haven't seen much of it.
Perhaps that's a bias from being in the USA? In Latin America it's far more often to want to talk about Americas as a whole (or about North/South America as a whole).
That can't be the case for me.
It's also not just Europe. The USA is similarly non-uniform. Coasts and Bible-Belt differ significantly, arguably more that certain European countries.
74% - 69% US
71% - 79% Germany
69% - 76% France
etc.
So what we have is not anecdote vs. data, but conflicting data sets.
The article is titled:
> Why U.S. Women Are Leaving Jobs Behind
But should be titled:
> Why Americans Are Leaving Jobs Behind
And then it could be a single sentence article:
> Because the economy sucks.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/12/upshot/the-rise-of-men-who...
http://www.cbs.nl/en-GB/menu/themas/arbeid-sociale-zekerheid...
The Netherlands is also pretty Scandinavian for a Benelux country.
"Since Kerry Devine, 32, and her friends began having children, she has noticed a stark difference between her female friends in Auburn, Wash., where she lives, and those in England and Cyprus, where she grew up. In the United States, they almost all stopped working outside the home, at least until their children were in school. Yet, she says, she can’t think of a friend in Europe who left work after her children were born."
First of all, let's remember that men are also leaving the workforce, and the decline of men in the workforce is a much older trend than women leaving the workforce:
https://familyinequality.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/wlfp1.j...
As to Europe, please see here:
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.FE.ZS
Let's start with overall female participation rates in the workforce:
France: 51%
Germany: 54%
United Kingdom: 56%
USA:57%
By this measure, the USA rate seems a little elevated, but not dramatically so.
Europe is catching up, but has not yet caught up:
http://www.thefinancialist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/fe...
A few Scandinavian countries exceed the USA rate, but most of Europe lags behind:
https://www.dss.gov.au/sites/default/files/images/women/Gene...
But what about mothers with kids? There the reality is the opposite of the one suggested by the quoted paragraph. Women with kids are more likely to work in the USA than in Europe. Look at the high rates of women with kids in the USA in this graph:
http://www1.eeoc.gov/eeoc/meetings/archive/4-17-07/boushey.h...
It is true the peak of the trend was many years ago, but the numbers are still high. The USA has a very high level of single moms, much more so than in Europe, and most of these women need to work, so the number of women with kids working will probably remain elevated in the USA.
Figure 1 shows that in Germany the rate remains below the USA level until the children are 10 years old:
http://www.public.asu.edu/~abick/bick_childcare.pdf
This is the pattern in most of Europe: as children get older, the percent of mothers who work approaches USA rates, but if we talk about mothers of young children, the USA has the highest participation rates in the world. Again, this is driven by single moms, and the lack of welfare benefits in the USA, compared to the richer social safety nets in Europe.
This article offers some insights about the USA:
http://www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2012/us-working-mot...
"In recent years, more mothers of young children have entered the paid labor force. While the share of mothers with children under age 6 in the labor force has risen sharply, the rate for all working-age adults has remained relatively flat. The recent economic recession, the steady decline in men's real earnings, the growth in single-mother families, and the increase in women's educational levels are some of the factors likely contributing to the growth in the proportion of mothers of young children in the workforce."
Also here, scroll way down to the graphs:
http://www.frdb.org/upload/file/paper_delboca.pdf
Again, you can see that the Scandinavian countries are ahead of the USA with both fertility and women working, thanks to more supportive policies for women, but most European countries are behind the USA rates.