经济学人下载:德国妈妈的工作(2)

Policy seems to play a powerful role in explaining the collapse in full-time employment in the east. Despite some recent changes, the policies of unified Germany, like those of the FRG, still assume that women are wives and mothers first. Joint taxation of married couples, free co-insurance for spouses and tax breaks for "mini jobs", or low-hours contracts, probably did little to encourage women in the west to up their hours, and put those in the east off full-time work. 

“政策”似乎在解释东德全职就业人数下降方面发挥了重要作用。尽管最近发生了一些变化，但统一后的德国和德国联邦政府的政策一样，仍然假设女性首先应该是妻子和母亲。对已婚夫妇的联合征税、对配偶的免费共同保险、以及对“迷你工作”或低工时合同的税收减免，可能对鼓励西德妇女延长工作时间并使东德妇女放弃全职工作没有什么帮助。

Attitudes, meanwhile, may help explain part of the lasting hours gap between east and west: 30 years after unification, eastern women are still more likely to approve of full-time working mums. This chimes with earlier findings that east Germans are more likely to have an egalitarian view of the roles of the sexes. 

与此同时，“态度”可能是解释东西德之间长期存在工作时长差距的部分原因：在统一30年之后，东德女性仍然更倾向于认可全职妈妈。这与早期的发现相一致，即东德人可能更倾向于用平等的眼光看待性别角色。

Attitudes have also changed over time, though. Strikingly, women born after 1975 in both the east and west are more likely to disapprove of mothers in full-time work than older ones, putting paid to the idea that younger women are keener on work. Perhaps women's views are shaped by the policies they face. Katharina Wrohlich, one of the report's authors, also suspects that the shift marks a rejection by younger women of both the dual-earner model of the GDR and the single-earner model of the FRG. "Instead the younger generation seems to be aspiring to the one-and-a-half jobs model," she says—a preference that policy may need to respond to in turn. 

不过，随着时间的推移，人们的态度也发生了变化。值得注意的是，不管是在东德还是西德，1975之后出生的女性比年长的女性更有可能否认全职妈妈，这推翻了年轻女性更热衷于工作的观点，或许女性的观点是由她们所面临的政策决定的。凯瑟琳·若珂是该报告的作者之一，她也怀疑这种转变标志着年轻女性对德意志民主共和国的双职工模式和德意志联邦共和国的单职工模式的排斥。她说：“相反，年轻一代似乎热衷于半工作模式。”这一偏好可能需要相应的政策予以回应。

The unification "experiment" hardly took place in laboratory conditions. Many women migrated from east to west. The regions differ in many other respects—incomes per head are lower in the east, for instance—that also affect the number of hours women work. But the episode still says something about the power of policy and the endurance of attitudes, long after walls are torn down. 

这场统一“实验”的基地并不是在实验室。其中也有许多从东德迁移到西德的女性。这些地区在其他许多方面也存在差异——例如，东德地区的人均收入较低——这也影响了女性的工作时长。不过，即便高墙已倒，这段插曲仍彰显了政策的力量和态度的耐力。