Global Policy Forum

By Jack Freeman

Although Norway is recognized as a world leader in the advancement of women in government, and has been for more than a decade, in the private sector Norwegian women are still lagging behind. A new survey released here by the Center for Gender Equality shows that Norway has the most gender-segregated labor market in all of the OECD. Women's pay is still lagging 5 percent behind men's pay for comparable work. Even more disturbing: It also shows only 5 percent of women working in offices occupy managerial positions, compared with 33 percent of men--even though the women are at least as well educated. And even though women constitute a majority of university students, 88 percent of university professors are men.

Ingunn Yssen, Director of the center, told The Earth Times she is also distressed by the survey's finding that the government's message of wider opportunities for women seems not to be getting through to the younger generation. She said that the overwhelming majority of girls are still choosing educational programs leading to traditionally "female occupations" such as teaching and health care, occupations that require hard work but offer relatively low pay.

In addition, she said, while 45 percent of women are working only part-time, many men are working overtime. "The thinking is quite traditional," she said. "The men see themselves as the breadwinners. And it's not just good for the women when they are elevated to management posts," she said. "It's good for the companies as well." What's more, Yssen said, it isn't only the girls and women who suffer from the current arrangement. "Young boys are a marginalized group too," she added, with far too many feeling they must prepare themselves to enter the same sort of low status jobs that their fathers hold.

Even in the area of government and politics, in which Norway has long been a leader in gender equality, things are not going as well as they might. Norway's leadership position dates from 1986, when its first female Prime Minister, Gro Harlem Brundtland (now Director of the World Health Organization), decreed that all appointed bodies within the government should contain no more than 60 percent of either gender. Today women make up 40.5 percent of government appointed committees and 41.9 percent of county councils. But they hold only 36.4 percent of the seats in the Storting (parliament), 34.1 percent of seats in municipal councils, 22.2 percent of county mayoral posts and 14.9 percent of urban mayoral posts. Those figures, Yssen said, are down from what they were a few years ago. But the government is working to reverse the trend. One of its main tool for educating the public is Yssen's center, which is wholly funded by the government to serve, she said, as a "watchdog, a kind of paid opposition."

Yssen served on Norway's official delegation to the Fourth World Women's Conference, held in Beijing five years ago, and she applauds the Platform for Action that it approved as "very good, moving in the right direction." One of her priorities now, she said, is to implement the platform's call to deal with the problem of domestic violence. She is sure that such violence is a problem in Norway, she said, but there are no statistics documenting it--and that too is a problem. "It's a problem that it's not considered a problem." She said that Norwegian police, like those in many other countries, tend to dismiss reports of wife-beatings as "domestic disputes" that do not require their intervention. Yssen added that she's working to change that.

Other findings of the survey: Norwegian women have a life expectancy of 81.3 years, compared with 75.5 years for men. The average Norwegian woman bears 1.81 children in her lifetime, a fertility rate considerable below the 2.1 "replacement" level. And there are 24.1 abortions for every 100 live births. The statistics also show that 49 percent of Norwegian babies are born out of wedlock, but Yssen said the country has very few one-parent households (6 percent of the total). It is commonplace, she said, for men and women to live together for years and raise families without formalizing their relationship with marriage.

Yssen said she would like to see Norway pass "affirmative action" laws, like those already in force in some other countries, requiring the government to deal only with companies that hire and promote minorities and women. What is it that is keeping Norway from achieving true gender equality? As Yssen sees it, it's "the myth that we already have it."

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