Gregory A. Fossedal, Direct Democracy in Switzerland, 2002.

16
Family

Swiss families are not radically different from their counterparts in the United States or Europe, affirming the truism that "all happy families are alike." They are, however, slightly more stable and close. The laws of the state, likewise, are somewhat more pro-family, or family based, than in most other highly developed countries. There is, moreover, a somewhat greater modesty in manners and dress, and in statutes governing such matters as decency in the mass media. Policies like those of social welfare treat the family, rather than the individual, as the fundamental unit of society, and thus, reinforce family structure. Switzerland has divorce, child abuse and neglect,.deadbeat dads, and many of the other ills seen in the West. It has them, though, with marginally less frequency. And it responds differently, legally and socially, when these maladies appear.

The net result, for an American, is a feeling that one is somehow visiting with a group of American families from the 1950s who have been transplanted into modern Western society. It is not an artificial, time-warp sort of feeling, and the culture does not in any way feel restrictive. On the contrary, the time appears to be the present, but the family structure somewhat transplanted. The modesty of the Swiss, if you will, is modest -- a quiet preference for stable, family-based life and a disciplined and responsible commitment to it. One probably hears appeals to "family values" and the like far less in Switzerland than in the United States, or even much of Europe.

One of the first social impressions likely to strike someone visiting Switzerland, second only perhaps to their facility with languages, is that of the large number of couples still married to their original spouse. My own sample in visiting was admittedly biased, at first, toward meetings with affluent professionals. It felt unusual, nevertheless, to meet one high-income man after another who was with his wife of twenty, thirty, and even forty years. Of course, this impression built up only cumulatively, until after many weeks it struck me that very few divorces seemed to take place. A little resolution formed, made both to test my own powers of observation and to keep such observations fresh from any sociological preconceptions, to make sure not to look at any statistics about Swiss family life. Similar, but even more subtle, was the impression formed by meeting young people in large numbers whose parents were still together. Time after time, these youngsters did not describe, for example, plans to spend the week before Christmas with their fathers and the week after with their mothers, and the like. Mothers and fathers most commonly lived in the same place, or so it seemed. After a time, a social relaxation takes place in Switzerland. There are not quite as many dual locations to keep track of; there are fewer Doreen Smiths no longer married to Jasper Smith, and vice-versa; in Switzerland, one worries just a little bit less that the Hendersons will disagree about what restaurant to go to, or whether their daughter should study architecture.

Swiss couples exhibit a natural ease, a fitting-togetherness one encounters in America and Europe as well, but perhaps not as often. When Mr. and Mrs. Fred Isler entertained me and a friend, for example, it became clear just how seamlessly their two lives intertwined. Mr. Isler was going over a kind of bar chart of his various charitable and community service activities over the years, telling little vignettes about each bar or answering my questions -- "yes, being a civilian in the appeals court, I would be involved in several cases a month. We shared the workload depending on the types of cases and who was particularly busy at a certain time." Now and then, however, Isler would be uncertain about who had attended a particular event, or what had been the resolution of a particular event or activity. At such times, Mrs. Isler would sometimes interject with words such as, "I think this was even three years," rather than two. Mr. Isler, on the other hand, frequently used the word "we" to describe a particular activity or commitment- -- even if nominally it had been "his" position. In an unobtrusive, unpretentious way, they seemed to agree that such tasks had been joint. In fact, of course, they had. "I went to the meetings," Isler said of the town council (or some similar task), for instance. "But when we got into a real disagreement, I would bring everyone here, and she always knew how to smooth it over."

Similarly, when Dr. Paul Jolles, the former Swiss State Secretary and Chairman of Nestle, would review his decisions and involvements in government, he would rely on Mrs. Jolles to fill in blanks -- and at times, correct him -- regarding important events or details. It is natural for many couples to settle into a routine of mutual skepticism. Such raillery between the Jolleses, however, seemed largely to consist of her insisting that his actions had been much more wise or incisive than he would admit -- and his countering that it was Mrs. Jolles who had encouraged him to do this or that. When some of Switzerland's differences with the United States and Europe in recent years came up for discussion, for example, Dr. Jolles was inclined to sympathize with Swiss officials. He said they had made mistakes, but that some of these were a heritage from years of neglect by other governments. Mrs. Jolles agreed but added a simpler explanation, which was, "They don't listen to you or people like you. In fact," she added, looking at me, "they don't even really ask for his advice or opinion at all." Dr. Jolles smiled, "which means they also don't get hers -- a real mistake."

It is difficult, of course, to paint a portrait of this ordinary family life that works without seeming wide-eyed and, indeed, a bit sappy. The fact is, though, that the Swiss have retained a degree of family solidarity that many would envy, whether or not it has an element of Ozzie and Harriet. Indeed, an honest search of my memory of interviews with more than 500 Swiss brings to mind only a few divorced men or women. Of course, many of these conversations were too short to be likely to have obtained such information/And undoubtedly, some of these people were divorced, some even remarried. It is perhaps revealing, though, that even in cases where there have been divorces, the subject is less apt to come up among the Swiss. There is just a little more of the melancholy that used to attend the matter, socially, still present among the Swiss.

In addition, the relative reserve of the Swiss generally explains much. In the United States and Europe, one sometimes encounters the corporate giant who rides a bicycle to work, or flies coach even on long trips.1 In Switzerland, such behavior, if not the mathematical norm, is certainly frequent. The chairman of ABB for many years rode a bicycle to work through the streets of Baden. Francois Loeb, head of one of the largest retail chains in Switzerland, drives a two-seat car, apparently spun off from the Yugo and achieving something like 70 miles per gallon of gasoline in the city. It is difficult enough to imagine a Swiss living in the imperial manner of some American or British corporate chieftans. To picture a Swiss executive bouncing between several wives, or dating young women twenty to forty years his junior, is difficult. It must happen in Switzerland, but it happens infrequently, and when it does, it is less the object of snickering admiration or newspaper headlines than of quiet embarrassment.

The Swiss man is close to family without being a house husband or highly sensitive child coddler. Swiss men with young children seemed less familiar with their day-to-day affairs than their mothers. But when the children reach age ten or older, the fathers become more highly engaged in their schooling and later, their professional life or family life. In conversations about women, Swiss men are less coarse than is the Western norm, and far less coarse than the American norm. There is less of an obsession with sex in normal conversation -- whether there is less interest in sex, is impossible to say, but certainly it is less obvious.

The statistics, it turns out, do more or less bear out the impressionistic picture of the Swiss as enjoying a closeness of family life rare in developed societies, as Table 16.1 suggests.

In addition to all the factors mentioned above, Swiss family law probably plays a role in the relatively high rate of family stability. Divorce laws, of course, vary by the canton, but as a general matter the advance of no-fault divorce has not been as great as in many Western countries. Even in such cantons as Geneva and Vaud, requirements are higher than the P.O.-box divorce systems of some U.S. states. And in the Waldstatte, or the central Forest Cantons with large numbers of orthodox Catholics, rules are more demanding substantively and procedures more rigorous.

As well, the social implications of divorce are more serious than in America. Swiss attitudes and laws, and the familiar character of most communities, make it very difficult for fathers to default on supporting their children both financially and emotionally, and for mothers to neglect a child who needs attention, support, or discipline. There are thus somewhat firmer supports for marriage and less of a "ticket to freedom" from marital breakup than in many developed countries.

Children in Switzerland are neither as revered as in Germany, treated as informally as in America, nor shunted aside as in England, Spain, or France. The Swiss take their children seriously and systematically. There is less emphasis than in the United States on early formal instruction, but perhaps more parent-to-child discipline and self-responsibility taught. An American four or five years of age is more likely to read than a Swiss child of that age, or to make a precocious comment, but is also more likely to wander off into the house and scribble all over one of the walls with a pen or waddle out into a busy parking lot where drivers are maneuvering aggressively for a choice spot or a fast exit.

From figures on women in the workplace, and my own anecdotal observations, a larger share of Swiss children aged zero through five are taken care of by their own mothers the bulk of the day, and a smaller proportion sent to day care or pre-school so their mothers can work part or full time, or manage the rest of the children. Although this could not be verified directly from international statistics, it seems supported by estimates of the number of Swiss mothers in the labor force -- about one-third of mothers with children at home, and perhaps a fifth or less of mothers with children younger than age six, work outside the home. The same conclusion would also seem to be supported by the complaint of many Swiss that young children do not receive enough formal schooling. From the performance of its economy, the Swiss do not appear to have suffered significantly from this. And there may be benefits in the greater socialization and feelings of greater security of Swiss youngsters.

Sheer geography may even lend a hand to Swiss marriages. Americans with a large number of children often bemoan the great distances that extended families find between parents and grandparents, brothers, and other relatives. Of course, there is little to stop individual Swiss families from living 2,000 miles apart, but if they do so, they will find their relatives in Israel, Turkey, Bulgaria, or even Western Russia. Since emigration is a large step, the vast majority of persons in any country, barring dire circumstances, are bound to remain in the country of their birth. For the Swiss, remaining in the country means living no more than a few hours from any other relatives still in Switzerland. Even relatives who move to Germany or France, two of the most common destinations, are relatively close compared to the distances that often separate members of an extended family in the United States.

As in other countries, the Swiss encounter some problems with their children in the adolescent years. Swiss suicide rates, in fact, are among the highest in the world. Surely one factor in these is the absence of some Swiss fathers in the more sexually divided work roles of dad at the office, mom at home. Others attribute these rates to mere density of population (a la Japan), particularly when one factors in the consideration that two-thirds of the Swiss nation is nearly uninhabitable mountains. Still another factor, according to some Swiss, is the high pressure placed on Swiss youth in the teenage years and early twenties to perform in school and other areas of life.

Among all Swiss, the fact of a seeming permanent affluence has led to a search for meaning. As the suicide rates indicated, not all are successful in finding it. Religion has withered, particularly among Protestants and among Catholics outside the highly Orthodox churches of Schwyz and the surrounding cantons. Even much religious life is quasi-secular. Church services in the major cities, and even to some extent the more fervent countryside, are not highly sacramental or theological. The religion of many Swiss has become almost the civic, Godless religion of Rousseau, though this trend is not as advanced as in France, Italy, or the United States.

A more happy picture, for the Swiss, emerges when one considers other social indices of adolescent adjustment. Perhaps the turmoil that seems evident in teen suicides, for example, is driven largely by accidental factors. Rates of violent crimes, which are normally committed by persons under thirty, are low. Teen pregnancy, abortion both by juveniles and as an overall rate, and similar unhappy statistics are relatively low, as Table 16.2 shows.

Public laws on abortion are characteristically Swiss -- federalist and nu-anced. A national law prohibits certain kinds of abortion restrictions and guards a right to abortion -- but the latter does not cover all cases, and the former allows for exceptions for cases involving the mental or physical health of the mother. In some cantons, these rules are interpreted quite liberally so that there is little practical restriction on abortion at all. In others, especially the Central and Eastern Waldstatte, women must visit a doctor, confer with a cantonal or community health official, and so on -- a series of three, four, or more steps. According to a 1996 article in the Swiss Medical Bulletin,2 rates of abortion varied by a factor of three and more from canton to canton. Some of this disparity, of course, may reflect women seeking out abortion services in the cantons where laws are more relaxed, but of course this is frowned on, and often entails a lack of health insurance coverage.

Few people in Switzerland are entirely happy with this cluttered situation, especially those who crave a clear-cut decision either to allow or to abolish abortion. The degree of unhappiness, however, is much less than in many Western countries where one side or the other has achieved a winner-take-all victory. Abortion rights advocates have achieved no national decision -- but can take solace that there is some liberty to obtain an abortion for most Swiss women, especially in the major cities. Opponents enjoy less than total ban, but neither have they had to endure, in the manner of the U.S., a sweeping decision by judicial elites to wipe out the action of democratic legislatures. Federalism allows Swiss families to seek out a community where the existing laws on abortion and other social matters comport with their sense of propriety and morality, while letting other cantons and cells establish the order that seems best to them. Where there is lobbying, it is by its nature decentralized, focused in two dozen cantonal parliaments and in thousands of communities overseeing the implementation of local standards by doctors and other professionals.

Periodic initiatives and referenda, at the national and cantonal levels, have the effect of giving voters a feeling of fine motor control, and the voters have generally opted to make compromises in the middle of the abortion debate, preferring not to enact the program of either the committed restric-tionists nor the advocates of abortion rights. Whereas in other countries vast campaigns must be launched merely to achieve a vote on public financing, or third-trimester restrictions, before the appropriate congressional committee, in the Swiss system there is always access. This access -- the fact of its availability, even if it is not always used -- has a soothing impact on the nerves of both the passionate advocates of both sides of the spectrum and of voters in between. The net result is, perhaps, a messy compromise, but one that works for the Swiss. Ironically, given their reticence toward controversy, the Swiss feel that the abortion question is a sensitive one and the controversy hot. This may so be in Swiss terms, but one has the impression that the abortion question and like issues are in fact less agitated in Switzerland than in most Western countries, and far less so than in countries with significant ethnic and religious differences underlying the disputes.

Women at Work

Some Swiss women felt, until recently, stranded "not in the 1950s but in the nineteenth century," as a Swiss feminist leader proclaimed in 1981. Pay for the same work by similarly qualified women runs about a quarter to a third less than for the same work done by a man, according to sociologist Rene Levy, although like most such statistics, these measurements appear not to account for the greater likelihood that a woman's career will be interrupted by children. Women occupy almost no CEO or COO positions among the top one-hundred Swiss corporations. The highest-ranking woman among major Swiss companies appears to be one of eighty division vice presidents at Nestle, who oversees the company's operations in Poland.

Swiss executives are so sensitive about the topic that when a high-ranking Nestle official was told his company has been praised by some as encouraging a more rapid rise by female executives, he preferred not to discuss the matter.3 "This is an area where all Swiss companies, including ours, would like to do more, and need to do more," he said.

What is true at the top is less true, but somewhat, throughout the work force. Swiss women make up about 44 percent of the work force; in the United States, 47 percent. On this macroeconomic level, the picture for working women in Switzerland is not radically better or worse than in most Western countries. Salaries in the banking, service, and professional sectors are 30 percent higher for men than women, with a lower gap among Swiss age thirty-nine or younger. This is similar to U.S. and European levels. In government service, average salaries are within 20 percent for men and women as a whole, and for men and women under forty the gap is less than 10 percent. All these figures suggest a work equation in which there are differences of opportunity, some of which can be explained by home care and other social choices made by women and men, some of which cannot.

If we start from 1940 as a base year [see Figure 16.1], women's wages have been outpacing men's in Switzerland ever since. In absolute terms, this only means they have been catching up. The years of the most dramatic improvement were from 1960 to 1980, when general economic growth and the decline of large families encouraged women to seek work outside the home in greater numbers. In the 1990s, the rate of closure slowed, partly due to an influx of foreign women (more likely to raise children at home), partly due to the economic slowdown.

Swiss women do not appear to feel marginalized, and the vast majority do not consider themselves the object of any systematic or conscious antifemi-nine bias by employers. "Many women prefer to work part time, or be away from work for some period to be with their families," comments Beatrice Gyssler, who works with a Swiss investment firm in Zurich. To that extent, some women are choosing to forego some earnings and professional opportunities in order to care for their children and be in the home more. Surveys indicate that for most Swiss married women who continue to work, the decisive reason is the belief that the husband's earnings alone are insufficient. The flip side is that many women, given the choice, would prefer to remain part of one-earner families. Even after the bumpy recession of 1990-96, Switzerland's economy still generates sufficient high-paying jobs for men to permit many families to prosper with only one worker outside the home.

In Swiss families with one or more children under the age of fifteen, there are 700,000 fathers working outside the home, and 450,000 mothers. (This figure includes foreign-born residents.) In Swiss families with no children under the age of fifteen, there are 1.4 million fathers working outside the home, and 1.2 million mothers -- a much closer ratio.

"The more the husband earns, the less likely the wife is to go out to work," as Rene Levy, a sociologist at the University of Lausanne, writes. "Many Swiss women prefer a role in the home over work, and if they must work, they prefer the maximum role in the home," observes Esther Girsberger, former editor of the Zurich daily Tages Anzeiger. "The statistics on women's pay and employment overstate the problem if you look at them expecting a statistical equality. Women's expectations and their preferences differ from that of Swiss men." Girsberger is an example of a field that has proven a natural entry point for women, journalism. Women are also making rapid strides in such professions as the law, computer software and service functions, and politics, to name just a few.

Small business has proven to be a natural venue for women in Switzerland as it has in a number of other developed countries. Home-based and small businesses often offer flexibility in hours that is highly valuable to women with children. In 1970, less than 20 percent of self-employed Swiss were women. In 1996,34 percent were. (This excludes farm wives and family workers.) This figure compares favorably to the absolute levels of small-business ownership by women in other Western countries -- 39 percent in the United States, 30 percent in Britain, and less than 30 percent in Germany, Sweden, Italy, and Finland -- and is growing at a faster rate. To be sure, some of these businesses are of marginal profitability, and have difficulty obtaining capital for expansion if they desire it. But they offer another alternative for women who want some income, and some activities outside the home, but may not have the time for uninterrupted employment in a traditional 9-to-5 pattern.

For many, of course, the role of Swiss women was symbolized by the country's decision, in 1971, to allow women to vote -- a right previously not recognized. The long delay was not quite as backward as it might have sounded. Women were neither that militant about the right to vote, nor had men (the only voters allowed to act on previous proposals, of course) been firmly opposed. The proposal, needing a supermajority of voters and cantons, however, had always fared poorly in a few of the central cantons -- some for substantive reasons, some because they feared that cantonal and community Landsgemeinde, literally overfilled by too many people, would become unworkable if the voting population suddenly doubled. Women mostly wanted the vote, understandably, not merely because they might occasionally make the difference in a specific decision on policy, but because they wanted to be heard and to have the institutional respect granted them in all the other democracies.

Ironically, although gaining the vote at a much later date, Swiss women have made great advances in elective politics in Switzerland. Well-educated and articulate, and experienced in thinking about issues as are all Swiss, the Swiss woman brings much to the profession of politics. Given the nature of Swiss government, however, politics is still something of a part-time profession. The cantonal legislatures and even federal parliament are paid little, have no dedicated staff, and are in session less than ten weeks a year. "There is a good fit between the Swiss militia system," meaning citizen government, "and the immense talent offered by Swiss women," as the late investor and publisher David dePury observed.

Indeed, the Swiss have a higher percentage of women in their parliament, more than 20 percent of the combined chambers, than the United States or most European countries. (In the lower house of the federal parliament, more than 23 percent are women, and of the combined membership of the cantonal parliaments, more then 25 percent.) Switzerland has now had one woman president, and following the election of another woman to the federal council in 1998, will have two more terms by women presidents by 2010, under the country's rotating presidency.

Swiss families feel the same strains as families throughout the West, tugged between economic forces outside and the job of raising children inside. It cannot be said that the Swiss have invented any unique answers to these modern tensions, but their institutions have coped with them in interesting and different ways. The Swiss family has proven flexible and, in some ways -- such as the rapid movement of women into positions in the country's citizen-government -- innovative.


Notes

1. There is a German joke about Swiss frugality that the Swiss enjoy telling, which goes: "Why did the Swiss executive fly third class? Because there was no fourth class."

2. M. Dondenaz, etal., "Interruptions degrossese en Suisse 1991-1994 " Bulletin de medicins suisses, 1996, vol. 77, pp. 308-14.

3. Asked for the names of prominent women chief executive officers of Swiss corporations, editor Markus Gisler of CASH, the Zurich-based financial weekly, said, "There really aren't any. I think Nestle has a woman running its Poland division, and possibly one or two others. They are known as one of the companies where women have been encouraged." Gisler's staff helped me track down several other female executives, mostly at much smaller companies.