Why French Women Don't Get Promoted - NYTimes.com: Lundberg goes on to ponder the hidden costs of social democracy: The ways in which “some of the government protections and incentives offered to mothers in France may in fact make their advancement in the workplace more difficult,” while “the more Spartan benefits in the U.S. actually contribute to providing more opportunities for women” — because there’s “less of a stigma in the United States about changing jobs or even careers in mid-life than there is in France, and because U.S. employers can more easily fire people, they may be more willing to hire as well.”
In effect, she’s providing a personal, country-specific confirmation of the point made by Kay Hymowitz in a recent Foreign Policy essay, which compared the achievements of working women in the laissez-faire U.S. to their counterparts in social democracies: