Where Women’s Work Is Job No. 1

In the United States, for the first time, the wives of both major-party presidential candidates are women with careers and accomplishments of their own, each a grade-grinding graduate of an Ivy League law school. With 58.9% of women in the work force, Americans might be expected to applaud the end of the political-helpmate era.

But no. First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton continues to be an object of suspicion and even loathing for some members of the press and public. And that gender discomfiture seems to extend generally to the political positions of power in Washington: No woman has served as president, vice president or leader of either chamber of Congress.

Here in Scandinavia, however, working women not only have been the prime minister’s spouse, they’ve been the prime minister (in Norway). Women also hold key government and party-leadership jobs in all of the four main Nordic countries--Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland.

Add Iceland, which also has a female head of state, and the numbers are even more striking: Among the five nations, women lead nine of the 37 national political parties, hold three parliament speakerships and make up from a fourth (Iceland) to a half (Sweden) of Cabinet posts.

Such a wave of women in high places has left a mark on policy:

* Abortion, a hopelessly controversial barometer of a woman’s freedom in the United States, is not only routinely accepted in all five Nordic countries--at least in the first three months of pregnancy--but it is also performed for free. No one would think of requiring a husband’s permission. Contraception is also available free and without fuss.

* Legislation comparable to the United States’ doomed Equal Rights Amendment was passed years ago in all five countries. (Iceland went first in 1976, after women there shut down the country with a one-day general strike.)

* Inexpensive institutional child care of high quality, provided by trained professionals, is widely available, with Sweden and Denmark boasting the most comprehensive systems. In Sweden, a day-care slot is guaranteed by law for every child older than 18 months, and care continues at after-school centers until children are 10. Family-values proponents take note: Sweden has not only one of the world’s highest rates of female labor-force participation--79.5%--but also one of the highest birth rates in the Western industrialized world.

* Family-friendly parental-leave policies are popular in Scandinavia, with Swedish parents--mother or father, it doesn’t matter which--free to take 64 weeks off their jobs after the birth of a baby, at 90% pay for the first year. Finnish parents have a legal right to a six-hour workday, and Danes are experimenting with a subsidized leave of up to one year, offered to all parents of children up to age 8.

One Swedish Cabinet minister, Margot Wallstrom, handles her cultural portfolio from her home, deep in rural pulp-and-paper country, 170 miles from the capital. There, Wallstrom tends her two small children and sends instructions to her Stockholm staff by fax and e-mail. The telecommunications cost to the Swedish taxpayer is $170,000 per year, but that is considered a small price to pay for the sending of a profound signal about family-friendly government.

Denmark, likewise, goes to special lengths to present a feminized face to the world, making sure that at least half of each year’s recruitment of new diplomats are women.

Progress in the Home

Even in the home, far from the reach of government policy-making, Scandinavian women have made some strides. Norwegian equality laws make it impossible for a man to draw himself up imperiously as the sole representative of his wife or children, allowed to make all decisions for them. Substantially more Finnish women than a generation ago report feeling loved by somebody. Swedish men do more housework than they did in the 1960s--and fewer Swedish women with jobs and small children are telling researchers that they are exhausted every day. (The men report that they are more tired, however.)

Even a single mother has a tolerable deal in this part of the world, according to Anna-Lena Eriksson, a 37-year-old Swedish single mother who lost her job as a waitress two years ago. Eriksson even believes that it is time her government did something to help men.

Divorced fathers, she maintains, get the short end of the stick when it comes to Sweden’s attractive array of apartment subsidies, enlightened judges and other low-hanging fruits of an advanced welfare state. She should know: As a single mother, she gets long-term unemployment benefits, special rental-support payments and a monthly “children’s money” stipend that has been a mainstay of Swedish family life since 1938. Eriksson’s brother, also divorced and a parent, gets less from the state, she says.

“As a single parent, I get more as a woman,” she says, drinking a warming cup of chicory in her small Stockholm kitchen while her 8-month-old son sleeps in the next room. “In Sweden, the mother is well protected.”

‘Political Will’

How did this state of affairs come to pass?

“I think it’s a question of political will,” says Mona Danielson, Sweden’s assistant undersecretary for equality affairs. “It started when more and more women went out into the labor market in the beginning of the 1970s.”

Sweden in those days much resembled the United States: More and more women were punching clocks, but decent child care was hard to find. So Swedish women began putting off motherhood. The birth rate collapsed, bottoming out at near-Depression-era levels in 1978.

Policy makers realized that if they did not do something, Sweden would face a labor shortage once the new “baby-bust” generation was grown up. And in high-tax Sweden, a labor shortage is a disaster because there are not enough revenue sources to finance the social-welfare benefits people have come to expect as the central pillars of the Swedish moral order.

Birgitta Dahl, now the parliament speaker, had just been elected when this was going on.

“She really had problems,” recalls her spokeswoman, Louise Gerdemo Holmgren. On the nights when sessions ran late, Dahl had nowhere to send her children, and they ended up sitting in the hallway.

So Dahl became a sort of missionary for state-provided child care. At the end of the 1960s, there were about 10,000 day-care slots in Sweden; by the end of the 1970s, there were 130,000. The number grew even more in the 1980s, and a law was entered on the books mandating institutional child care for all toddlers.

Today, thanks to Dahl and others like her, there is a sunny day-care center right in the Reksdagen, or Swedish parliament, where the deputies’ children can play with blocks, paints, books and a computer, under the eye of supervisor Berit Welin. It’s a far cry from sitting in the hallway, and even though Sweden is now under budgetary stress--and looking for such displays of public largess to rein in--Welin says her job is safe.

“This day-care center is one of the speaker’s top priorities,” she says with a confident smile. “I know that as long as she’s sitting where she is, I’ll be here.”

While Sweden and Denmark were experimenting with day care, Norway went a wholly different route. Coming out of the 1960s, a time of manifest inequality between the sexes, Norway chose to promote the cause of working women not with universal child care but with energetically employed quota systems--something often rejected in the United States and elsewhere in Europe as belittling to women or unfair to men, or both.

Since 1971, Norwegian political parties have run special nominating campaigns to choose female candidates before every election. Quotas are part of life in higher education and can be found in the collective-bargaining agreements struck between civil service unions and the states and municipalities.

Also, under Norway’s Equal Status Act of 1978, neither sex is supposed to hold less than 40% of the seats on any of the country’s public committees, boards or councils.

Norway is not yet in complete compliance with its own statute: 36.4% of such posts are filled by women at the municipal level. But at the level of federal elected officials, women now hold 42% of the Cabinet posts and 39% of the seats in the Storting, or parliament.

Couple of Catches

Is there a catch to all this? In fact, there are a couple of big ones.

First, no matter how smoothly Nordic women have moved into the labor force in the past generation, they have tended to stay in the public sector, where they end up doing the same sort of jobs women have done at home down through the ages: nursing the sick, tending the very young, teaching the school-age, looking after the elderly. All of these are civil service jobs in the Nordic countries.

“On the labor market, most women have ended up with the most strenuous jobs, in the lowest-paid occupations,” said Hanne Haavind, a professor of psychology at the University of Oslo.

In Norway, nearly half of all employed women work for the state, mainly in health care, social services, education or municipal government. Add that onto the additional 20% of Norwegian women who take up such traditional high-stress, low-security “women’s jobs” such as shop clerk or waitress, and the picture is far less heartening than the undigested “labor-force participation” statistics might first suggest.

In Sweden, “we have a very male structure over the private labor market,” says Bonnie Bergstroem, a former member of parliament who now runs a two-woman consulting firm. “Everybody knows everybody in Sweden”--the population is 8.9 million--”and especially in the private sector. They play golf together or go hunting together.”

And it is difficult for an aspiring corporate woman to take part in these often-quite-literal stag parties, the Swedish equivalent of poker night in the United States. “Women can go [hunting], but I’ve noticed that very few do,” Bergstroem says. “They have very special roles. They take care of the dogs.”

Just 9% of the managerial jobs in Sweden’s private-sector are held by women, compared to 45.7% in the U.S. In each Nordic country, a tiny number of the top executives in the 100 largest firms are women: two each in Finland and Sweden, three in Iceland and none in Norway or Denmark.

Another big catch to the Nordic way of doing things is that while the women may work as hard as men, and in nearly as great numbers, they still earn significantly less--just like their American counterparts. Although every Nordic country has laws on the books making equal pay for comparable work a legal requirement, none has succeeded in eradicating the gender-based wage gap.

To help right things, Norway, Sweden and Finland have created equal-status commissioners or ombudsmen in their governments: independent monitors who can gather data, field specific complaints and rule on cases of discrimination directly or pass them to the courts.

Two years ago, Sweden’s equality ombudsman ordered all employers to draw up and submit annual plans on how they will work toward pay equity.

‘A Huge Job’

“Reviewing the plans is a huge job,” Danielson says. “And the equality ombudsman has only 14 employees.”

Still, Scandinavian feminists say their government ombudsmen have their uses.

“Women earn less than men,” acknowledges Ingse Stabel, a Norwegian High Court judge who served as equal status ombudsman from 1988 to 1994. “But I remain fairly convinced that without the Equal Status Act, and without the enforcement apparatus we have at our disposal, the situation would have been far worse.”

It all comes down to familiar old questions: What’s better--a sedate but relatively limited life in a heavily regulated welfare state or a U.S.-style free-for-all in the dust and heat of unpoliced capitalism? Near-universal day care or more CEOs in heels?

Neither way, it seems, can offer both.

Walsh was recently on assignment in Stockholm.

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Status Report

How women are doing in various areas of Scandinavian society, according to gender breakdowns:

* Politics:

Except in Iceland, women fill about a third of the seats in national legislatures.

(percentage of parliament seats held by women)

Denmark: 34%

Finland: 39%

Iceland: 24%

Norway: 39%

Sweden: 33%

* Workplace prestige:

Women make up a substantial part of the labor force but hold few top positions in the private sector.

(women ages 20-64 in labor force)

Denmark: 77%

Finland: 74%

Iceland: 83%

Norway: 72%

Sweden: 81%

(managing directors in the 100 largest private companies)

Denmark

Women: 0 Men: 100

Finland

Women: 2 Men: 98

Iceland

Women: 3 Men 97

Norway

Women: 0 Men: 100

Sweden

Women: 2 Men: 98

Type of work:

Women tend to work in the services sector, men in other industries.

(percentage of women in community, social and personal services, which includes education and public health)

Denmark: 67%

Finland: 72%

Iceland: 67%

Norway: 64%

Sweden: 72%

Women do a disproportionate share of cleanup work.

(percentage of cleaning people who are women)

Denmark: 94%

Finland: 95%

Iceland: 93%

Norway: 90%

Sweden: 87%

Source: Nordic Council of Ministers