Minna Seikkula: Childcare arrangements play a significant role when it comes to questions about women’s participation in society. But how have women’s movements contributed to childcare policies and who gets to decide what is good childcare?
Dr Solveig Bergman, Director of NIKK (Nordic Gender Institute) and the coordinator of Work Package 2 in FEMCIT on Social Citizenship, emphasises that the focus in the WP is on the impact of women’s movements and other gender-related organisations on childcare and parental leave in Europe.

She stresses that the role of social movements and voluntary organisations in the development of childcare policies is scarcely researched and needs to be studied. "Women’s agency should not be underplayed", she argues.
According to Bergman the point of departure for WP2 is the recognition that childcare is one of the key questions in studying social citizenship from a gender perspective. "For many women childcare is vital to their enjoyment of full social citizenship, as well as economic autonomy and wellbeing. Today childcare and parental leave are not only feminist issues, but also an important part of European mainstream political discourses", she claims.
Solveig Bergman points out that in addition to the goal of extending the possible choices for women and facilitating the role of men as carers there might be other interests behind strengthening the childcare provision. "This relates even to the politics of dealing with demographic challenges in Europe and the need to increase the employment rate in order to compete globally", she explains.
FEMCIT WP2 approaches the questions of European childcare arrangements by a focus on different welfare state models. It aims to compare childcare policies, policy-making and gender-based activism in the Czech Republic, Spain, Finland and Norway. In this news item we introduce the Nordic sub-project. Later we will focus on the Czech and Spanish cases as well as on comparing our national studies.

Researcher Minna Rantalaiho is responsible for the part that focuses on the Nordic welfare state model. Referring to her research on Finnish and Norwegian childcare policies, she argues that there is unambiguous evidence that the childcare arrangements in both Finland and Norway have benefited women’s social citizenship by supporting women’s participation in society. 
However, Rantalaiho also points out that there are interesting differences between the two countries. "Examining two Nordic countries provides an opportunity for a more critical understanding of women’s social citizenship in these countries", she explains.
Minna Rantalaiho points out that though both Finland and Norway have a similar cash-for-childcare arrangement that supports home care for children, attitudes towards the policies vary in the two countries. In Norway the arrangement is heavily criticised, mostly by feminists and left-wing politicians, and women are increasingly choosing day-care services, while in Finland such criticism has trailed off and home-care and prolonged parental leave are more popular than is the case in Norway, says Rantalaiho. 
"Childcare is a contested issue, which makes it a matter of critical research, especially when we are aiming to understand women’s social citizenship", says Rantalaiho.
Both Bergman and Rantalaiho emphasise that it is also important to pay attention to the question of who gets to define what are the good solutions in childcare.  "A challenge for us researchers as well as for policy makers is to recognise different voices in discussions about childcare, when not all of them are equally loud", says Rantalaiho.
A focus on ethnic diversity and multiculturalism is integrated into the focus of FEMCIT. "The family patterns of minoritised groups and the relation of these patterns to the normative family model of welfare policies need to be studied and the claims of minority women's organisations and groups is included in our research", Solveig Bergman concludes.

(Article is written by Minna Seikkula. She is a student trainee at the Nordic Gender Institute)