OECD issued formal recommendations on adopting practices that promote family-friendly policies. Still, differences between family policies in resp. states are immense. How to deal with this issue?

Issue: In 2013 OECD issued formal recommendations on adopting practices that promote family-friendly policies and working conditions which should enable fathers and mothers to balance their working hours and their family responsibilities (There are also recommendations issued by the EU. and ILO has Convention 156 on work/family balance for all workers: women & men). However, there is still a strong gender division in the domain of reproductive work and the differences in the family policies in the respective states are significant.

Proposal: It is important to make the recommendations more binding and even to use legal instruments for that purpose. Diifferent countries should be supported strongly in introducing and reinforcing policies that promote gender equality and in providing concrete and operational guidelines for gender mainstreaming. It is also essential to work closely with experts to examine the impact of policies on the position of all the sexes in the labour market: Are they functioning and do they deliver the desired outcomes (i.e. the impact of policies in the Nordic countries on occupational segregation or the influence of long maternity leave on women's opportunities within the labour market)? Part of the solution would also be introducing general reduction of working hours. Finally, it is important to have the support of local actors in implementing the recommended policy measures as well as to promote international cooperation and exchange between them in order to reinforce policies that promote gender equality.

-->Example: in Switzerland a parliamentary initiative was submitted which demands that in future, supplementary family and school care should be available to all children free of charge from the end of the statutory maternity leave until the end of primary school. Financing should be the responsibility of the Confederation, the cantons and the communes. The Confederation is to invest around 1% of GDP annually, currently around CHF 6.9 billion. This amount is based on the OECD, which recommends its member states to spend at least 1% of GDP on childcare in the pre-school sector. In Switzerland, government spending on pre-school education currently amounts to 0.2%; in comparison, the Scandinavian countries spend well over one percent on pre-school education alone.