Photo: Susanna Blåvarg/Johnér
With the help of individual taxation, expanded child care for pre-school children, and generous parental insurance, the Swedish state encourages women to work outside the home and, after a parental leave period of one to two years, to return to their jobs. Parental insurance applies to both mothers and fathers and is linked to gainful employment, and benefits are directly related to a person’s salary. For 13 months, parental insurance, in the form of a leave of absence from work, is paid at the equivalent of about 80 percent of one’s salary (up to a certain ceiling), while for an additional three months, everyone receives the same fixed, daily rate. To encourage the parent who earns more – generally the father – to use his share of parental leave, the new Swedish government intends to introduce a financial “equal opportunity bonus.”
“Parental insurance is a cornerstone of the country’s high employment rate,” says Anita Nyberg, professor at the Center for Gender Studies at Stockholm University. “It encourages people to acquire work experience before they have children and to go back to work at the end of their parental leave. However, the problem is that women make more use of parental insurance than men. This often puts them at a career disadvantage because when they return to the workplace, they may discover that they have fallen behind in salary trends and career development.”
Women are in the Swedish labor market to stay. Even during recessions, women remain part of the labor force. A return to hearth and home when unemployment looms on the horizon is no longer a viable option.
Only about 2 percent of Swedish women are homemakers; on the other hand, a larger proportion of women than men work part-time, and most women who work part-time do so by choice. However, this statistic also hides some part-time worker unemployment, primarily in sectors such as nursing care and retail that, by tradition, organize their schedules around part-time help. It is interesting to note that the businesses where men are likely to work, such as hardware and electronics stores, almost always offer full-time positions and higher salaries.
With the arrival of children, the woman is more likely to reduce her working hours to meet the demands of children and housework, and as a result, she often loses her professional standing.
When the working hours for men and women are averaged over all the days of the week, Swedish women and men each work about eight hours a day. The difference is that women do more unpaid than paid work—primarily housework—while men are paid for most of the hours they work.
Studies show that, in recent years, Swedish women have reduced the amount of time they spend on housework; this probably means that they no longer prioritize clean houses and home-cooked meals, not that men are doing more of the housework; further, paid help in the home is unusual in Sweden.
Almost all children between one and nine years of age spend their days in some type of municipal day care, and both pre-schools and regular schools provide lunch so that parents do not have to go home to prepare a midday meal for their children. With the introduction of a fee cap in 2002, most parents can afford day care. The municipalities can also offer a child-care allowance to parents who wish to stay home with their young children instead of using municipal day care.
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