This article provides a brief overview of gender pay gap (GPG) statistics, including the unadjusted gender pay gap used to monitor imbalances in earnings between men and women. 2, I delivered her Friday,” she says, “and I was back at the office on Monday.”, Ohlsson says gendered expectations are one of many reasons there are fewer women in positions of power than there could be, although to reiterate, Sweden still has more than America does. Should you not have memorized the U.S.’s ranking on the most recent World Economic Forum scorecard, I’ll refresh your memory: it’s No. Above all, the shift will require Americans’ learning to love something many have long hated: Big Government. To my surprise, he doesn’t disagree. By contrast, the U.S. is large and diverse, and its government just passed tax cuts. In 2019, women's gross hourly earnings were on average 14.1 % below those of men in the EU. Why not reveal a giant for an ogre, when anything seems possible in politics, including the absolute worst? That kind of discrimination happens in the U.S. too, I say, except women are (illegally) passed over on the assumption that they’ll cut back or leave the workforce entirely after having kids. The moment when Mark decided they had to move to Sweden, where Anna had been born and raised, was when their then 3-year-old son asked his parents if they could start eating more slowly. The country’s last Prime Minister, who admittedly is also a man, adopted the label of “the first feminist government in the world.” Every year, Nordic countries jostle one another for the top spot in global gender-­equality rankings; over the next two weeks, more than one Swede will shamefacedly confess to me that the country recently dropped to No. And yet looking to Sweden is an American tradition dating back to when President Franklin D. Roosevelt sent a delegation to study how the country charted a path between American capitalism and Soviet communism. (President Trump told TIME in March 2017 of Sweden taking in refugees and immigrants, “what Sweden has done to themselves is very sad.”), “The louder you speak about brown men violating women’s bodies,” says StreetGaris board member Dima Sarsour, 36, “the more space you will get.”. Australia? Shrinking the size of the government, where most workers are women, would mean more women could make more money in the private sector, he says. Their first home-based day-care provider got shut down by the city, so they started paying $1,200 a month to the YMCA. A negative gender pay gap means that, on average, women's gross hourly earnings are higher than those of men. His name is Pierre Schori, and he’s Anna’s dad. Government laws and policies for gender equality. “I’m a pragmatist,” he says. Sex “reassignment” doesn’t work. Mark and Anna were both committed to their careers so they improvised: trading off, swapping babysitting with other parents and part-time nannies. “When the father came home at dinner, the mom had taken care of homework and dinner preparation. Canada? (Sweden.se) In Sweden, gender equality statistics are also very prominent. Ginsburg was energized by Swedish writer Eva Moberg’s article demanding to know why women had two jobs and men had only one. 2 section K) is higher than in the business economy as a whole (NACE Rev. And though men still make more money in both countries, the Swedish government designated three months of leave per parent, limiting how much they could take at the same time to avoid the burden falling on women. We don’t even have federally mandated sick days. After spending much of the past year reporting on sexual harassment and assault, including allegations against TV host Charlie Rose, I have arrived in Sweden feeling pretty bleak about men. The database is updated four times a … Photos, statistics and additional rankings of Sweden. His father worked long hours; at home, he says, “it was just my mom doing everything.” He went into the music business and met and married a photographer, Anna Schori. When #MeToo reached the highest echelons of Swedish society, it was no longer so easy to claim sexual assault was a problem brought by immigrants and refugees, as some on the right had. It’s impossible to “reassign” someone’s sex physically, and attempting to do so doesn’t produce good outcomes psychosocially. The gender pay gap in financial and insurance activities is higher than in the business economy as a whole. The Gini coefficient is based on the comparison of cumulative proportions of the population against cumulative proportions of income they receive, and it ranges between 0 in the case of perfect equality and 1 in the case of perfect inequality. As co-founder of the feminist collective FE-MALE in Lebanon, she advocates against discriminatory gender norms and policies and works closely with UN Women’s Men and Women for Gender Equality programme funded by the Government of Sweden. 2 aggregate B to N). Women are still paid less than men for full-time work (but, I discover, the gap is 8 points narrower than in the U.S.). For full-time workers, pay gaps varied also widely in the EU Member States, ranging from -1.6 % in Italy to 24.1 % in Latvia. In 2019, the gender pay gap in financial and insurance activities varied from 6.6 % in Belgium to 38.3 % in Czechia. The government still pays a monthly allowance to each Swedish child of about $142 to cover the basics. One afternoon after I get back from Sweden, I call up Nima Sanandaji, the author of The Nordic Gender Equality Paradox. “That was an illusion,” he says. The SES is carried out with a four-yearly periodicity. “Baby No. “If I were an American,” he says, “I would say, ‘For the taxes we already pay we should at least get public preschool.’”. The overarching Swedish principle for gender equality is that everyone, regardless of gender, has the right to work and support themselves, to balance career and family life, and to live without the fear of abuse or violence. Now that those three paid months of leave are use it or lose it, more men take it. There are alarmingly high Swedish rape statistics (although Sweden’s system encourages victims to come forward). The Gender Data Portal is the World Bank Group’s comprehensive source for the latest sex-disaggregated data and gender statistics covering demography, education, health, access to economic opportunities, public life and decision-making, and agency. Within the business economy as a whole, the highest gender pay gap was recorded in Germany (24.7 %) and the lowest in Sweden (8.7 %). The Rwandan government is set up to have at least 30 percent of its parliament members be women. No, Sweden doesn’t have a magic bullet. And yet. Mark says his very breathing has changed. Next to “days of paid parental leave” on America’s scorecard is a zero. She is one of several Swedish women I talk to who seemed to find the country’s professed commitment to gender equality overly restrictive, or too self-congratulatory, or too heteronormative and too two-parent focused, or just kind of embarrassingly earnest. Mark Kahaian was born in Michigan the same year Nixon vetoed that bill. Parental leave, she told me, was not about the parents, it was about the children, and in the beginning at least, children need their mothers. Then again, we have a chance to imagine something better. “My view of Sweden has changed,” she says. For example, it is a very progressive country that gives both parents three months of parental leave since 2016. So, I say, that might explain why the Nordic countries tried these gender-equal policies first, or why they have more of them, but why does that mean it can’t be tried anywhere else? In September, the neo-fascist Sweden Democrats won almost 18% of the vote and are vowing to block formation of a new government unless they get a say in policy. A year later, Congress passed by a wide, bipartisan margin a child-care bill. In 2019, the gender pay gap for part-time workers varied from -5.1 % in Italy to 22.0 % in Croatia. Maybe it’s no accident that the gut-wrenching truths of #MeToo have come at a time of massive political upheavals, of establishments of all natures being tossed out. The number of women in Parliament has declined since 2006 (but it’s still nearly half female). (iv) Gender disparities in politics, measured by sex rations in parliamentary seats. Israel? Towards true equality “Gender equality means that women and men, and girls and boys, enjoy the same rights, resources, opportunities and protections. Gender Equality Index 2020 was recently acknowledged as a reliable measurement tool for gender equality in the European Union, in an audit carried out by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre. However, those differences over age groups can have different patterns across the countries (Table 1). Meanwhile, even after the #MeToo-related resignation of multiple members in both parties, the U.S. Congress has yet to pass any legislation policing sexual harassment in its own ranks. Surge of flexible UK jobs could boost post-COVID gender equality. Despite the country’s commitment to equality, most Swedish women I talk to are eager to tell me about what falls short. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our, Why We're Rethinking Postfeminist Pop Culture. It is no inoculation against sexual abuses of power. One of the reasons has been this idea that this stuff is hindering women’s careers.” He concedes that the center-right government that was in power until 2014 wanted to cut taxes anyway, and all this gender-equality stuff “was kind of useful for them.”, “I think the American system is a bit odd,” he volunteers. But it turned out that while “having it all” was being put solely on the shoulders of each individual American woman—you’ve come a long way, baby!—Swedes were chugging away at the collective project of equality, which they realized from the start would have to be woven into everything they did, including their welfare state. The gender pay gap is generally much lower for new labour market entrants and tends to widen with age. As for “communal approaches,” being in Sweden underlined to me that, despite what one or two exceptional women has pulled off, no one can, or should, do any of this alone. They figured out that if women felt overworked at home and their job, there would be fewer Swedish babies, so they implemented cheap, universal child care, with a national curriculum that included gender equality. In Sweden, it’s not a secret that the country hasn’t yet achieved full equality. As an unadjusted indicator, the gender pay gap gives an overall picture of the differences between men and women in terms of earnings and measures a concept which is broader than the concept of "equal pay for work of equal value". This is where you say Sweden is a small and homogeneous country. In this regard, Norway has been ahead of the rest. “I was aware that having kids is a complete trap for women,” Anna told me. One of the people who mentioned Ohlsson’s short leave to me was, incidentally, Anna Schori’s mother, a women’s-­rights advocate. Gender. So has his experience of being a man. “I would say culture is not changed overnight,” Gottzen says. ... according to the Office for National Statistics. He tells me he secretly thought his leave would be a good time to work on his book. On October 22, 2009, the assembly of the Church of Sweden, voted strongly in favour of giving its blessing to homosexual couples, including the use of the term marriage, ("matrimony"). But that change didn’t happen just by waiting for it. 2 section E) and thirteen in the construction industry (NACE Rev. 04 March 2021 Gender and the labour market in Viet Nam. These gender gaps impose real costs on society… As the World Bank Group’s Women, Business, and the Law 2020 points out, “equality of opportunity is good economics.” Indeed, it is estimated that women’s lagging participation in employment and entrepreneurship cost the world about 15 percent of its GDP. “It’s not a white-man problem, it’s not a brown-man problem, it’s a man problem,” says Leila Trulsen, the Swedish-born daughter of a Tanzanian immigrant and one of the 13 board members of the feminist group StreetGaris. Information at this level of detail is not available, however, for all EU Member States (Figure 2). “We do this for our own needs, based on our own values,” he demurs, when I ask. Sweden, prodded by feminists, saw early on that maternity leave wasn’t enough and that giving only women leave created a system where women disproportionately did the household labor, so in 1974 it became the first country to implement paid paternity leave. Pagrotsky points out that limited government is a deeply rooted American value. Since paid family leave doesn’t expire until a child is 8, both Mark and Anna could take leave for their two sons, now 9 and 4. A 20-year-old premed student tells me about boys who dominate biology class even when they haven’t done the homework; a business-school professor describes an old-boys network of mentoring and promotion. Gender equality means that women and men and girls and boys enjoy the same rights, resources, opportunities and protections. 2 section F). A breakdown for the different sectors of the economy also reveals interesting patterns (Table 2). She’s proud, she says, of making parenthood work in the dog-eat-dog U.S. until the kids were toddlers. As we can see, the second half of the 20th century saw global improvements, and the regions with the steepest increase in gender equality … When Americans are asked why they’re having fewer babies, lack of affordable child care—among other basic economic concerns—is at the top of the list, though you wouldn’t know it from how little it enters the public conversation. Read more about the Gender Equality Index. “I had three colleagues in the government who were also going to be fathers for the first time or second time or third time, and there was not a debate at all about how they were supposed to deal with everything,” says Ohlsson. Across Member States, the gender pay gap varied by 20.4 percentage points, ranging from 1.3 % in Luxembourg to 21.7 % in Estonia (Figure 1). We only need to adjust it.”, In fact, Sweden is already adjusting. A quarter-century later, another American arrived in Sweden. On the scrubbed streets of Stockholm are dads balancing Joolz strollers, looking up from their cell phones to shake stuffed animals in an infant’s face; bearded dads in beanies with newborns on their laps at a café; dads pushing a pink bicycle up a hill as a helmeted child sulkily hoofs it. This page was last modified on 8 March 2021, at 09:47. Men had to liberate themselves too, she argued, to do what women already did, which was everything. In 1970, noted communist Richard Nixon started talking up affordable child care. The environmental objectives provide a structure and a tangible form for Sweden’s work with climate and the It has unintended consequences of limiting women’s upward mobility.” For example, employers, he says, might be less likely to hire a woman for a prime position out of the assumption that she’s going to take a long leave. In 2019, the majority of the EU countries (for which data are available) recorded a higher gender pay gap (in absolute terms) in the private sector than in the public sector. To keep the family afloat, Mark says, he “started working crazy jobs. The most recent reference years available for the SES are 2014 and 2018. Gender, Institutions and Development Database. Then at the judiciously nibbled pastry before him. Can American Men and Women Ever Really Be Equal. 5. What will it take for American women and men to be equal? The Swedes realized jointly taxing married couples meant women worked less, so in 1971 they started taxing individuals. (The gap was 28 points for women without college degrees.). In Sweden it tended to be, in a dual-earner couple, you would have a practice of parents alternating pickup.” American fathers wanted to be more involved, but that manifested itself mostly in helping their kids participate in sports. “Then we had another child. mothers come home earlier than fathers, since they are working less,” he says.