|
Finland Status of Women
After examining the position of women around the world,
the
Washington-based Population Crisis Committee reported in
1988
that Finland, slightly behind top-ranked Sweden and just
ahead of
the United States, was one of the very best places in
which a
woman could live. The group reached this conclusion after
examining the health, educational, economic, and legal
conditions
that affect women's lives.
When compared with women of other nations, Finnish
women, who
accounted for just over 50 percent of the population in
the mid1980s , did have a privileged place
(see
fig. 10). They
were the
first in Europe to gain the franchise, and by the 1980s
they
routinely constituted about one-third of the membership of
the
Eduskunta (parliament) and held several ministerial posts.
In the
1980s, about 75 percent of adult women worked outside the
home;
they made up about 48 percent of the work force. Finnish
women
were as well educated as their male counterparts, and, in
some
cases, the number of women studying at the university
level, for
example, were slightly ahead of the number of men. In
addition to
an expanding welfare system, which since World War II had
come to
provide them with substantial assistance in the area of
childbearing and child-rearing, women had made notable
legislative
gains that brought them closer to full equality with men.
In 1972 the Council for Equality was established to
advise
lawmakers on methods for realizing full legal equality for
women.
In 1983 legislation arranged that both parents were to
have equal
rights for custody of their children. A year later, women
were
granted equal rights in the establishment of their
children's
nationality. Henceforth any child born of a Finnish woman
would
have Finnish citizenship. After a very heated national
debate,
legislation was passed in 1985 that gave women an equal
right to
decide what surname or surnames they and their children
would
use. These advances were capped by a law that went into
effect in
early 1987 forbidding any discrimination on the basis of
sex and
providing protection against it. Once these laws were
passed,
Finnish authorities signed the United Nations Convention
on the
Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women,
in
1986.
In a number of areas, however, the country's small
feminist
movement maintained that the circumstances in which
Finnish women
lived needed to be improved. Most striking was the
disparity in
wages. Although women made up just under half the work
force and
had a tradition of working outside the home, they earned
only
about two-thirds of the wages paid to men. Occupations in
which
women predominated, such as those of retail and office
personnel,
were poorly paid in contrast to those in which men
constituted
the majority. Despite the sexes' equal educational
attainments,
and despite a society where sexual differentiation played
a
smaller role than it did in many other countries,
occupational
segregation in Finland was marked. In few of the twenty
most
common occupations were the two sexes equally represented.
Only
in occupations relating to agriculture, forestry, and
school
teaching was a rough parity approached, and as few as 6
percent
of Finns worked in jobs where 40 to 60 percent of workers
were of
the opposite sex. Studies also found that equal
educational
levels did not--in any category of training--prevent
women's
wages from lagging behind those paid to men. Women tended
to
occupy lower positions, while males were more often
supervisors
or managers. This was the case everywhere, whether in
schools or
universities, in business, in the civil service, or in
politics
at both the local level and the national level.
In addition to their occupying secondary position in
the
workplace, women had longer workdays because they
performed a
greater share of household tasks than did men. On the
average,
their workweek outside the home was several hours shorter
than
men's because a greater portion of them were employed only
parttime or worked in the service sector where hours were
shorter
than they were in manufacturing. Studies have found,
however,
that women spent about twice as much time on housework as
men--
about three hours and forty minutes a day, compared with
one hour
and fifty minutes for men. Men did twice as many household
repairs and about an equal amount of shopping, but they
devoted
only one-third to one-fourth as much time to cleaning,
cooking,
and caring for children. Given that the bulk of family
chores
fell to women, and that they were five times more likely
than men
to head a single-parent family, the shortcomings of
Finland's
child day-care system affected women more than it did men.
The Equality Law that went into effect in 1987
committed the
country to achieving full equality for women. In the late
1980s,
there was a timetable listing specific goals to be
achieved
during the remainder of the twentieth century. The
emphasis was
to be equality for everyone, rather than protection for
women.
Efforts were undertaken not only to place women in
occupations
dominated by males, but also to bring males into fields
traditionally believed to belong to the women's sphere,
such as
child care and elementary school teaching. Another aim was
for
women to occupy a more equal share of decision-making
positions.
Data as of December 1988
|
