There have been a lot of popular books in recent years about the characteristics of women of various nationalities, like French Women Don’t Get Fat, which we’ll discuss in a minute. They seem to reflect an interest in whether other cultures have something to teach us about living our lives better. Your own book is called Dutch Women Don’t Get Depressed. You have a PhD in psychology so are worth taking seriously, but before we all pack up and emigrate to the Netherlands, you mentioned that your book title isn’t quite true.

It was my publisher who came up with the title Dutch Women Don’t Get Depressed. I’m a science writer for a Dutch newspaper, the NRC Handelsblad, and my focus is on psychology. I had written a lot about happiness at that time, because it was a very popular topic in research. So I was planning to write a book about happiness, but then a lot of books on the subject came out at the same time, so I decided against it. I was having lunch with my publisher, and she suggested, “Why don’t you write a book like French Women Don’t Get Fat? How about Dutch Women Don’t Get Depressed? That’s also an alliteration.” We had a good laugh about it. I pointed out to her that it’s also not true, though we do score quite well on the happiness scales.

How well do you do?

We’re always in the top 10. We’re not completely at the top – Denmark is. I don’t know what Denmark’s secret is. That would also have been a good book – Danish Women Don’t Get Depressed – and another alliteration. But we got there first! Depression of course is an illness, and one woman in five gets depressed at a certain time in her life. That’s the same for all Western countries – it’s no different here in Holland.

But Dutch women are happier?

We are among the happiest countries, yes.

Are these books you’ve chosen going to shed some light on why that is? Tell me more about Dutch women.

I actually had some difficulty when I was writing my own book. I am a Dutch woman, but I had virtually no idea how other people look at us. What is the stereotypical Dutch woman? I had no idea and I started asking around. I asked Dutch people who had lived abroad for a long time, and I asked people who came from abroad to live in the Netherlands. And I got this stereotypical image of Dutch women, which is: We are pretty, we have a sort of natural beauty, but we don’t know how to dress. We are rather rude – we just say anything we like. We’re not very hospitable and we don’t cook very well. We eat cheese sandwiches and don’t do hot lunches. The only thing we eat hot at lunch is what we call kroketten – it’s sort of offal in breadcrumbs, it’s horrible. We don’t do Botox, we don’t blow-dry our hair. In relationships we are very bossy, I was told. We are very bossy to our men, but at the same time we are very un-bossy at work – and we don’t get to the top. We don’t dare to ask for a rise and we are not in a lot of management positions. [Compared with other countries] we’re always very low in the list of women in top positions – we’re somewhere near Pakistan, as one of the people I interviewed for my book pointed out. So we’re not very liberated in that sense.

Then I had to figure out why it is that we are happy, and I think it’s to do with the different types of freedom we have in the Netherlands. We can marry whomever we choose. We can work part-time or work full time, or we can decide not to work at all, and be a stay-at-home Mum – or just a stay-at-home woman, if we don’t have children. We have freedom of religion, we can dress any way we like. If we dress like a frump nobody cares. It’s freedom that gives us our happiness.

In the US, there’s quite a strong interest in “freedom” – but it seems to be an anti-government thing, and so, for example, in the name of freedom, we’ve seen strong opposition to universal healthcare. There seems to be a lack of appreciation of how liberating it is to know, even if you have a good job and are well off, that if you lost your job and all your money tomorrow, you’d still be taken care of. Some of the benefits the Dutch state provides to women are probably unimaginable to Americans.

There’s lots of social security in the Netherlands that’s not present in other countries. That gives you a vast amount of freedom to do whatever you like – and working part time is one of those things. About 72% of Dutch women work, but work is defined as “at least one hour of paid work a week”. About three-quarters of Dutch women only work part time.

This has been a matter for quite a bit of comment in the blogosphere – that less than 10% of Dutch women work full time. Does that sound right to you?

Well, if 72% work at least one hour a week, and three-quarters of those work part-time, that means that less than 20% work full time. But not less than 10%.