Secondly I will look into some ethical approaches addressing care as part of the basic ontology of human existence. In the following I will shortly resume the history of care ethics and present some challenges of today. Like Tronto, I maintain that there is no starting point for care it is part of life itself and thus part of the responsibility of every human being whichever culture, gender, position, and age. Inspired by various ethical theories and own empirical research I suggest placing care in a broader phenomenological understanding. Maybe these bad girls of the next generation represent a hope for the change that good girls shall never experience. As I write this article, nurses in Norway are pictured with a beard demonstrating that the inequality in wage paid for the same level of competence is gender biased. Thus, in spite of a constant frustration, every one of us contributes to the cementation of this societal and academic hierarchy. The leaders of my department realise that they are acting as good girls, following all the rules and expectations. Both ingredients are working together, reproducing a disadvantage that is difficult to change. In my view this is owed to the fact that the majority of the workforce in my department is female, and that the areas of care and social work are perpetually linked to women. The staff at this department is working more hours and having less time to do research than their colleagues at the more male staffed departments such as engineering, teaching, and IT. Soon I became aware of how my department of Health and Social Studies is the least recognised of all departments.
For four years I was elected member of the board of the University College at which I work. This holds at a personal level as well as at an institutional level. Teaching, supervising and doing research within the arena of health and social work has taught me how difficult it is for female professionals to get recognition for their work, often also by themselves. There are still a majority of women in health and social studies, and a majority of men in engineering, and IT a difference that is connected with value and recognition. This has however so far had little influence on the gender segregation in the labour market and at the arena of education.
To some degree men in Scandinavia are doing this increasingly they take parent leave, contribute more at home, and they often refuse to travel in business. Is it on this background, Esping-Andersen asks, possible to conceive a society with a labour market that optimises not only women’s ability to work and have children, but one that also lessens gender segregation? His conclusion is that the key issue of gender equality (like any inequality) lies in life course dynamics true gender equality will not come about unless, somehow, men can be made to enter a more feminine life course. In Scandinavia the rising birth rates are closely related to public expansion of welfare, health, and education services.
The majority of contemporary Scandinavian women opt for the dual-role model, intent on lifetime employment, but unwilling to sacrifice motherhood. According to Esping-Andersen it has been possible to combine high female participation with high birth rates only at the cost of extraordinarily gender segregated employment. In Norway we find the most gender segregated labour market in Europe and a vast market of part time jobs mostly occupied by women.
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