This week, in honor of International Women’s Day, we will pull together some of our earlier blogs on women and gender equality in Finland.
These blog posts are good background reading on women in the Finnish labor market this International Women’s Day.
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Honoring International Women’s Day with our blogs on women and gender equality in Finland
Over the years, we have published several blogs directly or indirectly addressing gender equality in Finland. We have addressed issues related to salaries, pay equality, and the pay gap. We have also discussed the gender segregation of the Finnish labor market quite often as that is directly related to the pay gap.
In several of our blogs, we have discussed salaries in Finland. We have collected those blog posts in our Ultimate Guide to Salaries in Finland. You should really check that out. Many of those blogs, however, also discuss gender issues.
Pay gap and pay transparency
In some of these salary blogs, we have specifically addressed the issue of the gender pay gap. In this blog post especially, we present the basic information about the gender pay gap in Finland. As we explain, currently the pay gap stands at 16 % in favor of men. This is the figure that most often gets quoted.
In another blog post, we discuss intra-industry variance in salary levels in Finland. In it, we also discuss salary variance between men and women. We connect that variance, particularly to the different jobs women and men do within the same industry.
The 16 % figure mentioned above, while quite depressing, does not, however, present the whole truth about the gender pay gap in Finland. When Statistics Finland compared full-time salaries of men and women working in comparable jobs in comparable sectors, those gaps shrank considerably. The gap is smallest for men and women working in the same jobs for the same employee. Still, the gap didn’t disappear entirely but it did shrink significantly from the often-quoted 16 % figure. We discuss this more detailed information in our Ultimate Guide to Salaries in Finland blog post.
Many of the above blog posts reveal pay injustices. We have, however, also discussed measures designed to combat those injustices. In this blog post, for example, we discussed the government’s plans to increase salary transparency in Finland through legislation. Unfortunately, the political parties comprising the Finnish government were not able to agree on the exact wording of the legislation. Thus they suspended the legislative work on the law in August 2022.
However, employers above a certain size are still legally required to do pay surveys. They are designed to reveal any unwarranted pay differences within the same company.
Gender segregation in the Finnish labor market
The 16 % gender pay gap in Finland can to a large extent be explained by the quite extreme gender segregation of the Finnish labor market. In this blog post, we demonstrate how this segregation shows up in the labor market. We also discuss some of the ramifications of that segregation.
Additional effects of this segregation showed up within the last few years. We demonstrated this in a number of blogs.
For example, in our Minna Canth Day (March 19) blogs, we discussed the effects of the Coronavirus on the Finnish labor market. We specifically discussed how the pandemic affected me and women differently. At the start of the pandemic in March 2020, we talked about how most of the essential workers in Finland were women. These were those working in the so-called frontline professions in the healthcare sector.
This was a topic also in another blog later that year. In it, we paid particular attention to the salaries of critical workers. We showed how women often make less than men in these critical professions.
 On Minna Canth’s Day a year later, we discussed how globally women and men were affected by the pandemic differently. We also introduced data from Finland.Â
The newest addition to this discussion is our blog on gendered career differences in the industrial sector of Finland. In this one, we discuss both segregation and pay gap.
Gender discrimination in the Finnish labor market
A post of this sort honoring International Women’s Day wouldn’t be complete without directly addressing gender discrimination in the labor market. Naturally, we have written several blogs about that as well. For example, we have written specifically about gender discrimination in technical professions in Finland. We’ve also addressed discrimination more broadly in this and this blog post.
While not strictly about discrimination, we’ve taken a critical look at gender diversity in the leadership of Finnish companies. We’ve discussed the composition of the boards of companies in Finland. We did this in two separate blogs. In the first one, we utilized reports published by others. For the second, we did some number-crunching ourselves. In another blog post, we looked at who are leading Finnish corporations.
Recently, we also wrote a blog post about employers’ attitudes toward older workers in Finland. In this one, we also described how workplaces can and should become menopause-friendly. This term is not currently used in Finland at all. In the blog, we discuss why being menopause-friendly should interest workplaces. After all, about 20 % of the workforce in Finland is currently dealing with menopause-related issues.
Additional blogs on women and gender equality in Finland
In writing about different phenomena affecting the Finnish labor market today, we often mention women-related issues at least in passing.
This is true, for example, for this one where the topic was the results of the 2019 Working Life Barometer. In it, we mention that women had either witnessed or experienced more violence at work than men in 2019. Women working in the municipal sector in 2019 often felt that there was too much work and too few people at their workplaces.
When discussing fixed-term employment contracts, we pointed out that women employees in Finland are more often in temporary employment relationships than men. Related to this is the fact that men in Finland more often have fixed weekly working hours than women.
In a blog discussing social relationships at Finnish workplaces during the pandemic, we highlighted differences in men’s and women’s experiences.
Our discussions about gender and money have not been limited to salaries. We’ve also discussed men’s and women’s income levels in Finland and the differences between them.
We’ve covered marriages and divorces in Finland. And naturally, we have also talked about how the family leave policy changed in Finland in the middle of 2022.
While our blogs are not an exhaustive source on women in the Finnish labor market, we feel that they are a well-rounded source of information on the topic. Hopefully, you find them useful on this International Women’s Day and beyond!
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