Teaching Gender in Social Work - MailChimp

From 1880, the most prosperous towns began to engage administrators
for office work associated with the poor relief services, which had been male
dominated. The first paid female visitors of the poor appeared in the 1910s.
In the 1930s the juridical basis of modern social welfare was founded; salaried
positions became available for the first time throughout the country. The figures
show that the main features of gender division arose in the initial stages
of Finnish social welfare. The local bureaucratic organisation of social welfare
placed men at the top, because the principal task was to execute new laws, an
area in which “masculine qualifications were necessary”.. In the late 1930s, the
gender division of welfare workers was as follows (Table 1):
Table 1. Gender division at municipal social welfare offices, 1938.
Position Male Female
% N % N
Director 98.5 (472) 1.5 (25)
Social worker 25 (110) 75 (326)
Office worker 15 (46) 85 (261)
46