Women in decision-making: The Norwegian Paradox

Introduction
In world-wide comparisons on gender equality the Nordic countries are regularly placed on
top of the lists. This is the case when it comes to the number of women in political positions
as well as broader aspects of gender equality such as economic opportunities, educational
attainment, health and well-being for women and men. 1
This fortunate situation in regard to gender equality is largely due to major
transformations in gender relations that occurred in Norway throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
The employment of women increased dramatically and women got access to political decision
making assemblies to almost the same degree as men.
Still it is important to emphasize the ambiguities and paradoxes of the Norwegian, as
well as for the rest of the Nordic countries, in relation to gender equality. On the one hand,
processes of gender equality are a general trend. Female employment has increased
immensely, from less than half of the female population in the early 1970ties to about twothird
today. Recently employment has increased the most among mothers with small children.
However, this is often not full-time employment. Statistics show that 40 % of all employed
women work part-time and 12 % of all employed men. In spite of the gender differences, parttime
work is more common in the Norwegian labour market, than in the rest of Europe. This
is partly a consequence of high employment rates
(http://www.ssb.no/english/subjects/00/02/10/ola_kari_en/arbeid_en/). Strong gender
segregation is another important feature of the Norwegian labour market. Along the horizontal
dimension, occupations and professions in the Norwegian labour market are strongly
segregated by gender, and the gender segregated structures co-varies clearly with the
1 Some examples of recent world-wide comparisons on gender equality are the World Economic Forum Gender
Gap (2005) which rank Sweden first and Norway second on the list (http://www.weforum.org) and the United
Nations Human Development Index (2002) which ranks Norway first and Sweden second (http://www.undp.org)
(also when gender aspects are taken into account see the GEM Gender empowerment measure and GDI Gender
Related Development Index). The Inter-parliamentary Union provides statistics regarding women in national
parliaments (http://www.ipu.org). Currently (2005) Sweden is ranked as number two and Norway number three
on the list.