[All five parties comprising the Finish governing coalition are
women and there is near gender parity in parliament. Yet Finland is
not a utopia for equality. There is still a wage gap, job segregation
and the reality of domestic violence.] [[link removed]]

WHAT DOES THE NEW FINNISH GOVERNMENT SAY ABOUT THE COUNTRY’S
COMMITMENT TO EQUALITY?  
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Fanny Malinen
March 18, 2020
Equal Times
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_ All five parties comprising the Finish governing coalition are
women and there is near gender parity in parliament. Yet Finland is
not a utopia for equality. There is still a wage gap, job segregation
and the reality of domestic violence. _

Finland’s Prime Minister Sanna Marin (centre right) pictured with
the Education Minister Li Andersson, Finance Minister Katri Kulmuni
and Interior Minister Maria Ohisalo , (Reuters/Lehtikuva Lehtikuva)

 

In December 2019, 34-year-old Sanna Marin from Finland’s Social
Democratic Party became the world’s youngest head of state. Her
centre-left government consists of five parties, all led by women,
four of them 35 or under. The cabinet has a female majority, and even
the parliament has near gender parity with 93 women MPs out of a total
of 200.

Marin’s government has made Finland a poster child for gender
equality worldwide, although it has long been considered one of the
most gender equal countries in the world, with women acquiring the
right to both vote and stand in elections as early as 1906.

Women comprise half of all university graduates in Finland and the
female-to-male labour participation rate
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per cent, compared with a world average of 65.8 per cent and an EU
average of 81 per cent. Anu-Tuija Lehto, a legal adviser at the
Central Organisation of Finnish Trade Unions (SAK) says that a key
contributor to gender equality in Finland is that fact that the state
has enabled women to fully participate in the workforce. For example,
parents are offered affordable public childcare in addition to
generous parental leave. “Also, we have free school meals,” says
Lehto, “while southern and central European countries still do not
have that. This means that someone has to be at home, cooking for the
children.”

However, Finland is not a utopia for equality. On average women are
paid 83 cents on every euro that a man earns. There is a high level
of gender segregation in the Finnish labour market
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with women comprising 90 per cent of workers in fields such as
childcare, healthcare and cleaning, while men dominate fields such as
construction and road haulage by a similar percentage.

Violence against women remains a major societal issue. In 2016,
two-thirds of people living with disabilities reported experiencing
discrimination. And a 2019 report
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European Commission against Racism and Intolerance found that:
“Racist and intolerant hate speech in public discourse is
escalating; the main targets are asylum-seekers and Muslims”.

“We need circumstances where women are not discriminated against in
their careers or in redundancies or anything else. Changing attitudes
means practical things in the workplace,” says Lehto, suggesting
that an informal chat between colleagues during coffee breaks is a
good place to start dismantling sexist or racist attitudes. And even
though Finland’s law on gender equality is more than three decades
old, other forms of equality have only been enshrined in law since the
2000s, when EU directives brought them in.

While the Finnish state guarantees every child the right to day care,
the previous centre-right coalition government restricted the number
of weekly hours the children of unemployed parents were entitled to.
Although in practical terms this was a relatively small change it was
a significant shift away from the principle of all children being
treated equally, and the policy was quickly reversed last year.

Iiris Suomela, a Green League (also known as the Greens) MP
tells _Equal Times_: “The child homecare allowance, which is the
smallest parental benefit, is mainly used by women – and especially
those who are less educated and on lower incomes. So, in
intersectional terms, the situation is feeble.”

Ninety-seven percent of those using the child homecare allowance are
women. A fifth of fathers do not use any parental benefits, which puts
Finland behind other Nordic countries. The government has promised to
improve the quality of daycare by reducing group sizes and introducing
quality standards, and to reform the parental leave system to
incentivise more fathers to stay at home by giving both parents a
quota of leave that cannot be used by the other parent.

Women rise to political power

How do Finland’s attempts to achieve gender equality translate to
the highest positions of power?

Theodora Järvi, who is studying for a PhD in political, societal and
regional change at Helsinki University, sees proportional
representation as one of the key factors behind the rise of women in
Finnish politics.

“The Finnish electoral system enables the rise of individuals better
than systems where votes just go to the party. In a closed list the
party decides who gets to Parliament, whereas Finland’s open list
system makes it possible for voters to affect this, as long as the
party gets enough support,” she explains.

Suomela says parties benefit from setting a diverse list of
candidates. “The electoral system requires that we have different
people as candidates. For example, in [my constituency] we had 19
people standing. There have to be people from different backgrounds,
because you have to get votes from different kinds of people.”

Järvi points out that the leaders of the parties in government got
most votes in their own parties or constituencies, with the exception
of the Greens whose leader Maria Ohisalo came second in vote share
after long-time minister and ex-party leader Pekka Haavisto. “It is
important to note that these positions of power reflect voters’
choices, not just the parties’ internal preferences for
leadership,” Järvi explains.

At 25, first-term MP Suomela is the youngest in the current
parliament. She says there are many challenges for women in politics.

“Behavioural norms for young women are very strict. When a female
minister swears on TV, there is a massive uproar, but when a
middle-aged man from the other side of the political spectrum uses
abusive language, or is even suspected to have committed a crime, it
does not cause a similar reaction,” she says, referring to a recent
incident where the education minister and leader of the Left Alliance
Li Andersson described an opposition politician as talking
“bullshit”. On the other hand, several MPs with the far-right
Finns Party (the largest opposition party) are under investigation or
have been convicted
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‘incitement against an ethnic group’.

Suomela also points out that political crises often provide fertile
ground for sexism. Finland’s first female prime minister Anneli
Jäätteenmäki only held the position for two months in 2003 before
being forced to step down, and the 2000s have seen three other female
ministers across parties resign due to public pressure in a country
where political scandals are rare.

“When women have encountered crises in ministerial positions,
situations that men would have survived have often proved fateful for
women,” says the MP, adding that “sexism makes it easier to
scapegoat women”.

But Suomela sees equal treatment as a question of democracy. “If
voters choose people for positions of power and then they get treated
differently, that’s disrespectful towards thousands of voters.”

Prime Minister Marin grew up in a low-income family with her mother
and her mother’s female partner. She was also the first person in
her family to attend university. Greens leader Maria Ohisalo has
spoken out about her experience of childhood poverty and growing up in
the shadow of her father’s alcoholism, in a contrast to the
middle-class image usually associated with politicians in Finland and
elsewhere.

A fragile coalition with an ambitious programme

After elections in April 2019, Finland’s five coalition parties
negotiated an ambitious programme that aims to make Finland
carbon-neutral by 2035, amongst other measures to improve equality and
boost investment in the welfare state. Lehto of SAK says the trade
unions are content with the government programme and its many
references to equality. “It is clear that women have participated in
writing it,” she says.

Many Finns seem to agree: in February, a poll showed that 64 percent
of the population are satisfied with Marin’s government. But that
does not mean it is without its internal tensions. The coalition
government had only been in power for six months when the prime
minister who had formed it, Antti Rinne, had to step down when the
Centre Party withdrew its confidence in him following a long and
fraught postal workers’ strike. Marin – who was the first deputy
leader at the time – received praise for her performance during the
election campaign when she stood in during a period when Rinne was on
sick leave, and was quickly lifted up to lead the government when he
stepped down.

The wide coalition was pieced together from parties with differing
priorities. They coalesced around social democratic and human rights
values after the far-right Finns Party came a close second – only
0.2 per cent away from the winning Social Democrats – in the
election.

The Centre Party in particular, which draws its support from the rural
areas and is losing votes to the right-wing populists, is often seen
at odds with the Greens who would like to see more ambitious climate
targets.

Since the election, the Finns Party has continued its ascendancy in
the polls. It leads in popularity with over 20 percent support and
dominates media attention with a constant flow of racist and offensive
remarks such as celebrating an arson attack on a house that was due to
house asylum seekers and the Ebola epidemic in the Democratic Republic
of Congo.

Suomela comments: “Popularity matters when you can use it for making
policies that you agree with. If that support gets too much emphasis,
it can lead to other parties starting to follow the policies that
increase inequality and fuel prejudice, which can further those aims
even more than the party could do in power. We should have the courage
to stick to what the majority of the people want, which is politics
that furthers human rights, equality, and is climate friendly. We need
to have the courage to show that politics works, and it can improve
people’s lives. It is not a zero-sum game where we need to stamp on
other people’s rights to get something better.”

_Fanny Malinen is a London-based independent journalist, writing on
and campaigning for social and economic justice. She is particularly
interested in debt and financialisation as well as finding sustainable
alternatives. Twitter : @fannymalinen
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