Friday, January 1, 2010

Women in the workforce

Female power

Across the rich world more women are working than ever before. Coping with this change will be one of the great challenges of the coming decades

THE economic empowerment of women across the rich world is one of the most remarkable revolutions of the past 50 years. It is remarkable because of the extent of the change: millions of people who were once dependent on men have taken control of their own economic fates. It is remarkable also because it has produced so little friction: a change that affects the most intimate aspects of people’s identities has been widely welcomed by men as well as women. Dramatic social change seldom takes such a benign form.

Yet even benign change can come with a sting in its tail. Social arrangements have not caught up with economic changes. Many children have paid a price for the rise of the two-income household. Many women—and indeed many men—feel that they are caught in an ever-tightening tangle of commitments. If the empowerment of women was one of the great changes of the past 50 years, dealing with its social consequences will be one of the great challenges of the next 50.

At the end of her campaign to become America’s first female president in 2008, Hillary Clinton remarked that her 18m votes in the Democratic Party’s primaries represented 18m cracks in the glass ceiling. In the market for jobs rather than votes the ceiling is being cracked every day. Women now make up almost half of American workers (49.9% in October). They run some of the world’s best companies, such as PepsiCo, Archer Daniels Midland and W.L. Gore. They earn almost 60% of university degrees in America and Europe.

Progress has not been uniform, of course. In Italy and Japan employment rates for men are more than 20 percentage points higher than those for women (see chart 1). Although Italy’s female employment rate has risen markedly in the past decade, it is still below 50%, and more than 20 percentage points below those of Denmark and Sweden (chart 2). Women earn substantially less than men on average and are severely under-represented at the top of organisations.

The change is dramatic nevertheless. A generation ago working women performed menial jobs and were routinely subjected to casual sexism—as “Mad Men”, a television drama about advertising executives in the early 1960s, demonstrates brilliantly. Today women make up the majority of professional workers in many countries (51% in the United States, for example) and casual sexism is for losers. Even holdouts such as the Mediterranean countries are changing rapidly. In Spain the proportion of young women in the labour force has now reached American levels. The glass is much nearer to being half full than half empty.

What explains this revolution? Politics have clearly played a part. Feminists such as Betty Friedan have demonised domestic slavery and lambasted discrimination. Governments have passed equal-rights acts. Female politicians such as Margaret Thatcher and Mrs Clinton have taught younger women that anything is possible. But politics is only part of the answer: such discordant figures as Ms Friedan and Lady Thatcher have been borne aloft by subterranean economic and technological forces.

The rich world has seen a growing demand for women’s labour. When brute strength mattered more than brains, men had an inherent advantage. Now that brainpower has triumphed the two sexes are more evenly matched. The feminisation of the workforce has been driven by the relentless rise of the service sector (where women can compete as well as men) and the equally relentless decline of manufacturing (where they could not). The landmark book in the rise of feminism was arguably not Ms Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” but Daniel Bell’s “The Coming of Post-Industrial Society”.

Demand has been matched by supply: women are increasingly willing and able to work outside the home. The vacuum cleaner has played its part. Improved technology reduced the amount of time needed for the traditional female work of cleaning and cooking. But the most important innovation has been the contraceptive pill. The spread of the pill has not only allowed women to get married later. It has also increased their incentives to invest time and effort in acquiring skills, particularly slow-burning skills that are hard to learn and take many years to pay off. The knowledge that they would not have to drop out of, say, law school to have a baby made law school more attractive.

The expansion of higher education has also boosted job prospects for women, improving their value on the job market and shifting their role models from stay-at-home mothers to successful professional women. The best-educated women have always been more likely than other women to work, even after having children. In 1963, 62% of college-educated women in the United States were in the labour force, compared with 46% of those with a high school diploma. Today 80% of American women with a college education are in the labour force compared with 67% of those with a high school diploma and 47% of those without one.

This growing cohort of university-educated women is also educated in more marketable subjects. In 1966, 40% of American women who received a BA specialised in education in college; 2% specialised in business and management. The figures are now 12% and 50%. Women only continue to lag seriously behind men in a handful of subjects, such as engineering and computer sciences, where they earned about one-fifth of degrees in 2006.

One of the most surprising things about this revolution is how little overt celebration it has engendered. Most people welcome the change. A recent Rockefeller Foundation/Time survey found that three-quarters of Americans regarded it as a positive development. Nine men out of ten said they were comfortable with women earning more than them. But few are cheering. This is partly because young women take their opportunities for granted. It is partly because for many women work represents economic necessity rather than liberation. The rich world’s growing army of single mothers have little choice but to work. A growing proportion of married women have also discovered that the only way they can preserve their households’ living standards is to join their husbands in the labour market. In America families with stay-at-home wives have the same inflation-adjusted income as similar families did in the early 1970s. But the biggest reason is that the revolution has brought plenty of problems in its wake.

Production versus reproduction

One obvious problem is that women’s rising aspirations have not been fulfilled. They have been encouraged to climb onto the occupational ladder only to discover that the middle rungs are dominated by men and the upper rungs are out of reach. Only 2% of the bosses of Fortune 500 companies and five of those in the FTSE 100 stockmarket index are women. Women make up less than 13% of board members in America. The upper ranks of management consultancies and banks are dominated by men. In America and Britain the typical full-time female worker earns only about 80% as much as the typical male.

This no doubt owes something to prejudice. But the biggest reason why women remain frustrated is more profound: many women are forced to choose between motherhood and careers. Childless women in corporate America earn almost as much as men. Mothers with partners earn less and single mothers much less. The cost of motherhood is particularly steep for fast-track women. Traditionally “female” jobs such as teaching mix well with motherhood because wages do not rise much with experience and hours are relatively light. But at successful firms wages rise steeply and schedules are demanding. Future bosses are expected to have worked in several departments and countries. Professional-services firms have an up-or-out system which rewards the most dedicated with lucrative partnerships. The reason for the income gap may thus be the opposite of prejudice. It is that women are judged by exactly the same standards as men.

This Hobson’s choice is imposing a high cost on both individuals and society. Many professional women reject motherhood entirely: in Switzerland 40% of them are childless. Others delay child-bearing for so long that they are forced into the arms of the booming fertility industry. The female drop-out rate from the most competitive professions represents a loss to collective investment in talent. A study of graduates of the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business by Marianne Bertrand and her colleagues found that, ten years after graduating, about half of the female MBAs who had chosen to have children remained in the labour force. It also leaves many former high-flyers frustrated. Another American study, this time of women who left work to have children, found that all but 7% of them wanted to return to work. Only 74% managed to return, and just 40% returned to full-time jobs.

Even well-off parents worry that they spend too little time with their children, thanks to crowded schedules and the ever-buzzing BlackBerry. For poorer parents, juggling the twin demands of work and child-rearing can be a nightmare. Child care eats a terrifying proportion of the family budget, and many childminders are untrained. But quitting work to look after the children can mean financial disaster. British children brought up in two-parent families where only one parent works are almost three times more likely to be poor than children with two parents at work.

A survey for the Children’s Society, a British charity, found that 60% of parents agreed that “nowadays parents aren’t able to spend enough time with their children”. In a similar survey in America 74% of parents said that they did not have enough time for their children. Nor does the problem disappear as children get older. In most countries schools finish early in the afternoon. In America they close down for two months in the summer. Only a few places—Denmark, Sweden and, to a lesser extent, France and Quebec—provide comprehensive systems of after-school care.

Different countries have adopted different solutions to the problem of combining work and parenthood. Some stress the importance of very young children spending time with their mothers. Austria, the Czech Republic, Finland and Hungary provide up to three years of paid leave for mothers. Germany has introduced a “parent’s salary”, or Elterngeld, to encourage mothers to stay at home. (The legislation was championed by a minister for women who has seven children.) Other countries put more emphasis on preschool education. New Zealand and the Nordic countries are particularly keen on getting women back to work and children into kindergartens. Britain, Germany, Japan, Switzerland and, above all, the Netherlands are keen on mothers working part-time. Others, such as the Czech Republic, Greece, Finland, Hungary, Portugal and South Korea, make little room for part-time work for women. The Scandinavian countries, particularly Iceland, have added a further wrinkle by increasing incentives for fathers to spend more time caring for their children.

The world’s biggest economy has adopted an idiosyncratic approach. America provides no statutory paid leave for mothers and only 12 weeks unpaid. At least 145 countries provide paid sick leave. America allows only unpaid absence for serious family illness. America’s public spending on family support is low by OECD standards (see chart 3). It spends only 0.5% of its GDP on public support for child care compared with 1.3% in France and 2.7% in Denmark.

It is difficult to evaluate the relative merits of these various arrangements. Different systems can produce similar results: anti-statist America has roughly the same proportion of children in kindergartens as statist Finland. Different systems have different faults. Sweden is not quite the paragon that its fans imagine, despite its family-friendly employment policies. Only 1.5% of senior managers are women, compared with 11% in America. Three-quarters of Swedish women work in the public sector; three-quarters of men work in the private sector. But there is evidence that America and Britain, the countries that combine high female employment with reluctance to involve the state in child care, serve their children especially poorly. A report by Unicef in 2007 on children in rich countries found that America and Britain had some of the lowest scores for “well-being”.

A woman’s world

The trend towards more women working is almost certain to continue. In the European Union women have filled 6m of the 8m new jobs created since 2000. In America three out of four people thrown out of work since the recession began are men; the female unemployment rate is 8.6%, against 11.2% for men. The Bureau of Labour Statistics calculates that women make up more than two-thirds of employees in ten of the 15 job categories likely to grow fastest in the next few years. By 2011 there will be 2.6m more women than men studying in American universities.

Women will also be the beneficiaries of the growing “war for talent”. The combination of an ageing workforce and a more skill-dependent economy means that countries will have to make better use of their female populations. Goldman Sachs calculates that, leaving all other things equal, increasing women’s participation in the labour market to male levels will boost GDP by 21% in Italy, 19% in Spain, 16% in Japan, 9% in America, France and Germany, and 8% in Britain.

Rex Features

The next generation

The corporate world is doing ever more to address the loss of female talent and the difficulty of combining work with child care. Many elite companies are rethinking their promotion practices. Addleshaw Goddard, a law firm, has created the role of legal director as an alternative to partnerships for women who want to combine work and motherhood. Ernst & Young and other accounting firms have increased their efforts to maintain connections with women who take time off to have children and then ease them back into work.

Home-working is increasingly fashionable. More than 90% of companies in Germany and Sweden allow flexible working. A growing number of firms are learning to divide the working week in new ways—judging staff on annual rather than weekly hours, allowing them to work nine days a fortnight, letting them come in early or late and allowing husbands and wives to share jobs. Almost half of Sun Microsystems’s employees work at home or from nearby satellite offices. Raytheon, a maker of missile systems, allows workers every other Friday off to take care of family business, if they make up the hours on other days.

Companies are even rethinking the structure of careers, as people live and work longer. Barclays is one of many firms that allow five years’ unpaid leave. John Lewis offers a six-month paid sabbatical to people who have been in the company for 25 years. Companies are allowing people to phase their retirement. Child-bearing years will thus make up a smaller proportion of women’s potential working lives. Spells out of the labour force will become less a mark of female exceptionalism.

Faster change is likely as women exploit their economic power. Many talented women are already hopping off the corporate treadmill to form companies that better meet their needs. In the past decade the number of privately owned companies started by women in America has increased twice as fast as the number owned by men. Women-owned companies employ more people than the largest 500 companies combined. Eden McCallum and Axiom Legal have applied a network model to their respective fields of management consultancy and legal services: network members work when it suits them and the companies use their scale to make sure that clients have their problems dealt with immediately.

Governments are also trying to adjust to the new world. Germany now has 1,600 schools where the day lasts until mid-afternoon. Some of the most popular American charter schools offer longer school days and shorter summer holidays.

But so far even the combination of public- and private-sector initiatives has only gone so far to deal with the problem. The children of poorer working mothers are the least likely to benefit from female-friendly companies. Millions of families still struggle with insufficient child-care facilities and a school day that bears no relationship to their working lives. The West will be struggling to cope with the social consequences of women’s economic empowerment for many years to come.

Health reform

The home stretch

Democrats are one step from turning dreams of health reform into reality

Obama’s Christmas present and future

RONALD REAGAN would not be pleased by what is happening in Congress today. Over the past century many other presidents tried to expand health-care coverage to all Americans. But as far back as 1961 Reagan argued that this would lead to socialised medicine, from which “will come other government programmes that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country until one day…we have socialism.”

Undaunted by such conservative fears of rationing and “death panels”, Barack Obama has pushed his party’s congressional leaders to draft a sweeping health-reform law. After much ugly bickering and bribing throughout 2009, the Democrats passed a version of reform through the House of Representatives in November by a vote of 220 to 215. The fight was bloodier and the pay-offs more brazen in the Senate, but on Christmas Eve the upper chamber passed a health-reform bill on a party-line vote of 60 to 39 (60 being the minimum number required to overcome Republican procedural obstacles).

Democrats are savouring this victory over the holiday recess, but when they return in January the joy will fade. That is because coming up with a final law that Mr Obama can sign before his first state-of-the-union message (usually delivered by the end of January) will require merging the efforts of the two chambers.

A casual glance might suggest that not much separates the two bills: both would dramatically expand health coverage by forcing insurers to end discrimination based on health, introducing a requirement for everyone to buy insurance along with subsidies to help those who have trouble finding the money to do so, and creating heavily regulated insurance exchanges. And some of the differences will be easy to reconcile. Each bill has timid efforts at cost control (the House has lots of pilot programmes on payment reform, while the Senate calls for an independent commission to propose future payment reforms) which, if combined, will improve the final product.

Alas, there are also several big differences between the bills that will not be easy to reconcile. The most controversial involves the creation of a government-run insurer (or “public option”), a shibboleth of the political left. The House bill has a weak version of a public option, but the Senate bill lacks one altogether. Howard Dean, a former presidential candidate and leading leftist, argues that the whole reform effort is thus a sham and should be scrapped. Yet all conservatives and many moderates, especially in the Senate, say they will not vote for any final bill that contains a public option.

Another big difference is in how the two bills pay for the expansion of coverage. The likely final cost is around $900 billion over the next decade, a limit imposed by Mr Obama. The House version soaks the rich with a 5.4% income surtax on individuals making more than $500,000. That proposal was deeply unpopular in the Senate, which chose instead to impose a 40% tax on the most generous health-insurance plans. The most difficult rift may be over abortion. The House bill contains a severe clause that makes it impossible for insurers that accept federal subsidies to offer abortion cover at all. The Senate bill allows insurers to do this, but forces patients receiving subsidies to write separate cheques for abortion cover.

The usual way bills are reconciled in Congress is by cabal. A committee of elders from both chambers meets in secret and hashes out a compromise, and the revised offering is put to both chambers at the same time. That could take weeks given the size of the bills and the procedural blocking tactics likely to come from Republicans. Some insiders are now talking of an unusual, and possibly speedier, approach that involves any compromise being rushed through one chamber first on an up-or-down vote; if it passed, the other chamber would then try to pass an identical bill quickly.

What next?

Whatever the manoeuvres, the hard part will be the substantive compromises to come. The current betting is that the Senate version will prevail on most points; the vote was so close that Democrats cannot afford to lose even one senator. This means that the public option will probably wither on the vine. On financing, too, the Senate is unlikely to accept the House income-tax proposal as it stands, though a watered-down version may be combined with a weaker tax on expensive health plans.

Though the odds are now strongly in favour of some sort of health bill landing on Mr Obama’s desk within a month, it is by no means a certainty. Abortion, an issue on which many American politicians find compromise impossible, may yet doom this effort altogether. Senator Christopher Dodd, a grizzled veteran from Connecticut, assesses the prospects this way: “There are large differences between the House and the Senate…This is very precarious. Anybody who thinks this is done hasn’t been around here very long.”

Álvaro Uribe's Colombia

Not yet the promised land

A safer and richer country, but one that needs more jobs and better socioeconomic policies—as well as constant vigilance

WILSON VEGA used to run a small farm near Barrancabermeja, in the broad, tropical valley of Colombia’s Magdalena river. He was negotiating to buy the farm from its owner. But FARC guerrillas began to visit. They sought to recruit his eldest daughter, who was then aged 14. In November 2006 the guerrillas called a town meeting and shot five people whom they accused of collaborating with the army and right-wing paramilitaries. Mr Vega says he received glancing bullet wounds to his head and back. That was enough to persuade him and his wife to gather up their seven children and flee.

Their new home is a one-room hut of corrugated iron and board on a steep hillside overlooking a dried-up lake bed in Soacha, a sprawling poor suburb of Bogotá, the capital. For this, Mr Vega pays 55,000 pesos ($27) a month in rent. He earns around 5,500 pesos a day recycling rubbish. As displaced people, his family get some money from the government, and he has bought a broken-down pickup. If he can scrape together the cash to get it running, he hopes to start a business selling fruit. But he also dreams of returning to farming in another, safer, rural area.

Mr Vega’s two dreams are shared by many other Colombians. Creating the conditions in which they can be realised will be among the tasks facing the government to be chosen in a presidential election in May. In his two terms since 2002 Álvaro Uribe has made Colombia less violent. With American aid and a new wealth tax he has expanded the security forces by half. Better security in turn helped to boost economic growth (see chart).

But there have been several recent security setbacks—most dramatically the kidnapping and murder by the FARC just before Christmas of the governor of Caquetá department, in the south-eastern lowlands. Mr Uribe himself says that the improvement in security is not yet irreversible—and that is why he is seeking to change the constitution to run for a third term. Yet Juan Manuel Santos, his former defence minister, who aspires to succeed him (if the president does not run again himself), is one of many politicians who differs. Although more needs to be done on security, he thinks this is now a less important issue than the lack of decent jobs and other socioeconomic problems.

That is a sign of Mr Uribe’s achievement. His security build-up drove the FARC from heavily populated central Colombia to remoter areas. The FARC has shrunk to less than half its 2001 peak of 20,000 fighters and has lost several of its leaders (a dozen mid-level commanders were killed in 2009). The government persuaded some 30,000 right-wing paramilitaries to demobilise. It is trying to integrate many of them (and guerrilla deserters) into civilian life through education and training involving 34,000 people. In an ambitious, if flawed, attempt to secure a modicum of justice, the attorney-general’s office has so far obtained confessions by 158 former paramilitaries to 4,300 crimes, and identified some 40,000 victims who are supposed to be compensated.

But problems persist. Urban violence rose again in 2009: a doubling of murders in Medellín, the second city and previously seen as successfully pacified, is particularly worrying. Several thousand former paramilitaries have returned to arms in what Mr Uribe says are criminal, drug-trafficking gangs. (His left-wing critics claim they have political aims.) There are some signs that the FARC has reorganised, relying on landmines and snipers to demoralise the army.

Although cocaine production has fallen by around half since 2001, according to estimates by the United Nations, drug money continues to fuel the guerrillas and other criminal gangs. It is their battles to control territory that have uprooted people like Mr Vega. According to CODHES, an NGO, some 4.6m Colombians have been displaced since 1985, and 380,000 in 2008 alone. But the government puts the overall figure at 3m since 1959 and says the trend is downward. A more powerful criticism is that Mr Uribe has shown little will to help displaced people to recover their land by reversing the land seizures by paramilitaries over the past two decades.

The security forces have their own problems. The attorney-general’s office is investigating claims (most unproven) that the army murdered up to 1,800 civilians and passed them off as dead rebels (a practice dubbed “false positives”). When this scandal came to light after the kidnapping of several young men in Soacha in 2008, Mr Uribe sacked 27 officers, including three generals. Army units are no longer judged by their body count. Detectives are now flown in to investigate all deaths reported in combat. CINEP, a human-rights group, found only two incidents of “false positives” in the first half of 2009. But the affair damaged the army, and according to some reports, has undermined its morale. Similarly damaging have been repeated scandals at the civilian intelligence agency, where some officials have been charged with colluding with paramilitaries. The agency is belatedly being wound up.

In security, the task of the next government will be to consolidate Mr Uribe’s achievement while adjusting his policies to new threats. “It’s no longer just giving orders from the top but developing and implementing plans” to control territory and protect the population, says a former official. And Colombia now needs police on city streets as much as troops in its jungles.

It also needs jobs, if it is to prevent its youth joining the illegal economy of drug gangs and armed groups. The economy has suffered only mild recession. But open unemployment stands at 11.8%, compared with a Latin American average of 8.3%. Some 60% of Colombians work in the informal economy—again, more than the regional mean. Alejandro Gaviria, an economist at Bogotá’s University of the Andes, points out that there are fewer formal jobs for people without higher education than in 1995. Public policy has contributed to this dismal trend. Steep payroll taxes discourage employment. So does a minimum wage that is disproportionately high in relation to the country’s income levels.

Part of the blame belongs with the constitution approved in 1991. This introduced some welcome democratic reforms. But it also “empowered everyone and created chaos,” as Roberto Steiner of Fedesarrollo, a think-tank, puts it. Much social and economic policy is now dictated by the judiciary. Court decisions have helped to bankrupt the national health-insurance system, only 45% of whose members now pay full contributions. That obliged the government to announce emergency financing measures last month.

Sluggish recovery

But Mr Uribe has himself undermined the tax system, decreeing tax breaks for favoured companies and then making these permanent through “tax stability” contracts. He defends these as necessary to attract investment. Guillermo Perry, a former finance minister, argues that this would have come anyway because of better security and high commodity prices.

These problems may weigh heavily in the coming years. The economy is recovering more slowly than others in the region. Half of Colombia’s exports went to the United States and Venezuela in 2008: but American demand remains sluggish and Venezuela’s government has imposed trade sanctions on Colombia in protest at a recent defence co-operation agreement between Mr Uribe and the United States.

Back in 2002 Colombia was in serious danger of becoming a failed state. Millions of its brightest citizens had migrated abroad. Travellers on the roads between its main cities risked being kidnapped or killed. It is a tribute to Mr Uribe that today’s problems look so much more manageable. He points out that “younger Colombians haven’t known a single day of peace.” He insists the country needs to stick to his policies “without stagnation or sudden swerves”. Yet his growing number of opponents argue that progress cannot continue unless there is a change at the top.

Steamy scenes

Europe.view

Steamy scenes

Bracing northern habits reach south-west London

YOUR columnist has recently moved house. Although his new garden is small, it does have enough room for a small hut, painted black and concealed by a trellis. It is a rarity in this part of the world. Most visitors assume it is a garden shed. Others know better. For Latvians, it is a “pirts”; for Lithuanians, a “pirtis”. Russian guests are thrilled by the prospect of a “banya”. Finns and Estonians are already stripping their clothes off as soon as they hear the word—the same in both languages—“sauna”.

Alamy

If you go down to the woods today

Such visitors are tactful about its shortcomings. The real thing should be home-built and fuelled by hand-chopped logs gathered from a nearby forest. It also should be near a river or lake for the cooling-off sessions. None of that is possible in Chelsea.

But even your columnist’s electric version (it costs around £1,500 or $2,000 for the smallest, two-seater outdoor model; an indoor version is a bit cheaper) does the trick. As sweat pours from your pores, worries trickle away too. It is hard to be tense when you feel that you are melting. Inside the sauna you can talk (if you must), read (if you can) or—best of all—just think. You can listen to the “singing stones” (sounding like an Arvo Pärt symphony as they exhale steam). You can beat yourself or a friend with a whisk, made from a birch, oak or lime branch (it improves the circulation).

In between, you drink, nibble and take cold baths (or use the garden hose for an impromptu shower). In the morning, it prepares you for work; in the evening, it gets you ready for bed. The endorphins linger, delightfully, for hours afterwards.

Such treats are lost on visitors from the benighted lands with no sauna culture. English guests view the “saw-na” (as they call it: the real pronunciation is closer to “sow-na”) with great suspicion. They stare unhappily at the kit: the wooden bucket and ladle, the strange mushroom-like hats, the linen loincloths, the small bottles of birch-bark oil, dark brown and pungent. The canister of salty sauna honey (for rubbing on the skin) and the birch-branch whisks (shrink-wrapped, imported from Estonia and stored in the freezer) arouse horror. They look with trepidation at the temperature gauge, which reaches 120°C (248°F).

They are deeply uneasy about nudity, even among close friends. They would like to try it, one day, maybe, perhaps, but with the temperature right down, in strict privacy and certainly with a swimsuit on. They worry about what the neighbours may think.

To be fair, sauna etiquette varies hugely between countries. In Russia, mixed-sex banyas are rare and have a somewhat sleazy connotation. In other north European countries such as Germany, Estonia and Finland, nobody finds nudity a big deal. In some cultures, chucking water on the hot rocks is mandatory: in others it is close to hooliganism. Attitudes to children vary sharply too: your columnist’s sons, veterans of the magnificent Sandunovskaya baths in Moscow (our favourite hangout during the family's years there) were forcibly ejected from a hotel sauna in Britain on the grounds that it was “too dangerous” for the under-16s.

It is easy to get into arguments about the history, technique and merits of saunas. Is a “smoke sauna” (where the logs are burnt in a chimney-less hut, giving plenty of atmosphere but also rather a lot of soot) the ultimate experience or a primitive aberration? As with vodka, strong views on the whys and wherefores abound. But unlike vodka, saunas usually resolve arguments rather than worsening them. Try one in 2010.

Under starter's orders

The election campaign

Under starter's orders

The contest sharpens as it enters its final few months

BRITAIN was once renowned for its mercifully brief election campaigns. Americans subjected to almost ceaseless electioneering envied the four-week official hustings from the dissolution of Parliament to polling day itself. But just as prime ministers have become more presidential, so general elections have come increasingly to resemble those across the Atlantic.

The actual vote in 2010 is likely to be in May and must be held by early June. Yet politicians have been campaigning since last autumn’s party conferences. Set-piece events, such as the pre-budget report on December 9th, have been more nakedly political than usual. Labour ministers grumble that civil servants are hoarding ideas and energy for the Tories, the new masters they may soon be serving. Political discourse—even at a time of war in Afghanistan and the most serious economic slump since the second world war—is dominated by the micro-politics of campaign tactics and opinion polls.

The latter point to the most open election since 1992 when John Major, the then prime minister, pulled off a surprise fourth consecutive victory for the Conservatives. Now the Tories enjoy a comfortable lead (see chart), but one that has shrunk in recent months. That is a worry for them because uneven constituency sizes and other vagaries of the electoral system discriminate against the party. It needs a swing of seven percentage points in its favour—the second biggest ever—to win an overall majority in Parliament of just one seat. True, this assumes a uniform swing across all constituencies, and the Tories are targeting their superior resources on the most marginal seats. But there remains a serious prospect of a hung parliament.

Such an inconclusive election outcome has not happened since 1974, when Britain faced not just an economic but also a political crisis caused by overmighty trade unions. Today the trouble afflicting the country is economic and fiscal: news on both fronts over the next few months may sway the election’s outcome (see article). The Tories want rapid spending cuts to deal with an alarming deficit of 12.6% of GDP in 2009-10. Gordon Brown says this betrays complacency about a prospective economic recovery that is, to the prime minister’s mind, too fragile to do without continued government largesse. He also hopes that the Conservatives’ zeal to wield the axe will undo their hard-won trustworthiness as guardians of the public services.

But the government itself is split on just how much austerity is needed. The Treasury wanted a stingier pre-budget report than the one that emerged after aggressive lobbying from Mr Brown and other ministers. Cuts to university funding recently announced by Lord Mandelson suggest that the powerful business secretary is among the fiscal hawks in the cabinet. Ed Balls, the schools secretary, is the most prominent advocate of big spending.

Labour is also divided on the wisdom of making class-based attacks on the Tories, a line favoured by both the prime minister and Mr Balls. By contrast, the likes of Lord Mandelson and Tessa Jowell, the Cabinet Office minister, are wary of alienating the more prosperous south.

Yet the Conservatives may be vulnerable to such an offensive. The party says that raising the threshold of inheritance tax (a promise they made in fatter times for the national coffers) is now a low priority but will eventually happen. By contrast, reversing the government’s planned increase in national-insurance contributions is a high priority, but not a guarantee. This line may not survive the heat of an election campaign.

Neither of the two main parties commands much enthusiasm in the country. They can blame much of this on an anti-politics atmosphere, which pre-dates the MPs’ expenses scandal that broke last May but was intensified by it. Britain is in no mood to replicate the euphoria that greeted Labour’s sweeping victory in 1997. But there is still scope for the parties to improve their own pitch to voters. Labour may have a clear “spend to grow” message on the economy, but it has less to say about Britain after the recession. The Tories have plenty of promising futurology to do with decentralising power and reviving civil society. But they are shakier on the economic here-and-now, and run the risk of sounding too bleak.

Labour, insist many in the party, is a strong team fronted by a hopeless leader. In David Cameron, the Tories boast an admired leader in charge of a largely anonymous shadow cabinet. The problem for Labour is that Mr Cameron can shift the spotlight to some of his promising colleagues (there are a few). Rebranding Mr Brown, whose personal ratings remain dismal, seems a lost cause. A series of American-style televised debates, the first of their kind in Britain, will pit the two men against each other before the election (Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, will also take part).

The home stretch

The prime minister does have the advantage of being able to choose the timing of the election, but his decision now seems less in doubt than in recent weeks. There had been speculation that Mr Brown would go to the polls in March, to spare himself the ignominy of another budget exposing the desperate state of the public finances. But that argument has been weakened since the pre-budget report, which went down less badly with voters than feared, maybe because of its crowd-pleasing tax raid on bank bonuses. And the weather argues against an early election; a dark and cold polling day is thought to work to Labour’s disadvantage by keeping more of its voters at home.

Whenever the election is held, the government can achieve little of substance before it. Parliament rose even earlier than usual for the Christmas holiday. A flurry of policy announcements that the Tories are planning for January will force day-by-day responses from ministers already distracted by the call of the campaign trail.

Merely surviving to fight the general election is an achievement of sorts for Mr Brown, whose leadership has been under threat for most of his time in power. Indeed, the sense that he has seen off defenestration may explain his untypically perky mood, which was visible even before his party’s recent mini-recovery in the polls. And if the unpopular leader of a 13-year-old government that has presided over a wretched recession ends up limiting his opponents to a narrow majority in Parliament, or even a minority government, that would warrant some cause for satisfaction on his part.