Europeans and Americans alike have certain romantic notions about Sweden. We imagine it as a land of liberal-minded people living in a bastion of equality--which, in many ways, it is. Sweden has the second highest number of female parliamentarians in the world. Half its government ministers are women. Its wage gap is narrow, and females are well represented in the labor force. Both the United Nations and the World Economic Forum have rated it tops in the world for equality.
But no paradise is without its paradoxes. In Sweden, the biggest one is this: while the government has done much to improve the lives of women, it has also created a glass ceiling for them that is thicker than that in many other European countries, as well as in the United States. While state-funded child care and extremely long and cushy maternity benefits (480 days with up to 80 percent of pay) make it easy to be a working mother in Sweden, such benefits also have the effect of dampening female employment in the most lucrative and powerful jobs. In Sweden, more than 50 percent of women who work do so in the public sector--most as teachers, nurses, civil servants, home health aides or child minders, according to the OECD. Compare this to about 30 percent in the U.K. and 19.5 percent in America. "Private-sector employers are less willing to deal with the disruption caused by very long maternity leaves," says Manuela Tomei, a labor sociologist with the International Labor Organization in Geneva. "Gender discrimination in Sweden may be more subtle, but it is very much there."
The link between family-friendly policies and female employment are a hot topic all over the developed world, as birthrates fall and a shortage of skilled labor looms. Europeans have looked to the Nordic countries as a model--longer maternity leaves and state-funded child care must make it easier for women to have careers, or so the conventional wisdom goes. And indeed the system does make it easier for women to hold lower- to midlevel jobs and have children (Sweden has managed to keep its birthrate relatively high). But as London School of Economics fellow Catherine Hakim notes, policies that raise the birthrate "don't necessarily translate into complete gender equality, particularly in the private sector."
Swedish women are unlikely to hold important managerial positions. A study by former ILO economist Richard Anker using data from 2000 found that while women in the United States held 45.3 percent of managerial positions, their Swedish counterparts held only 29.2 percent (Britons held 33 percent, Germans 27 percent and Danes 23 percent). And, while the average wage gap between the genders in Sweden is narrow (about 15 percent), it can exceed 40 percent in high-end jobs. And while the gap is closing in other countries, it has held steady in Sweden for most of the last decade.
The situation is becoming a key political issue. Swedish officials are considering whether to emulate a recent move in Norway, which decreed that all companies must have at least two women on their boards by the end of 2006. A proposal to require men to take at least three months of the 480 days of parental leave will be a big topic in this spring's elections. But whether quotas can change the social dynamic is unclear. Anker points out that most countries with a high number of women in Parliament also have a high number in corporate management, but not Sweden. He attributes this to the fact that the number of women in Parliament is dictated by law, not by wider social shifts, which presumably would have affected the private sector, too.
Swedish officials argue that generous welfare makes the system more competitive, in part because childcare frees women to work. But it can't be fully competitive if it frees women to work only at middle- or low-level jobs. And many larger companies are beginning to see the advantage of promoting women. Nearly 40 percent of the managers at SEB, Sweden's largest bank, are female and the bank is pushing for more. Goteborg University professor of gender history Anita Goransson says that Swedish women in top jobs often have mothers who also worked at high levels. One tough woman begets another, and more of them will make Sweden an even tougher competitor.
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