Twenty Years of the Act on Equality between Women and Men in Finland
The Act on Equality between Women and Men was adopted after a long drafting phase and a great deal of disagreement and came into force at the beginning of 1987. Finland was the last of the Nordic countries that adopted a law regulating gender equality.
One of the persons who played an essential role in bringing about the Act was Gerhard af Schultén. He was somewhat of an outsider when he was asked to participate in the committees drafting the Act. He prepared a preliminary draft together with Ulla Lång. It was a question of work done as civil servants, af Shultén said.
Different interest groups had to content themselves with the role of opinion givers only. This also applied to the labour market parties. Kirsti Palanko-Laaka considers that one of the reasons for that may have been that the employer party had adopted a very negative stance towards gender equality as a whole. Palanko-Laaka herself considered the Act to be very important and significant.
Deputy Director of the Confederation of Finnish Industries (EK) Eeva-Liisa Inkeroinen states that the relations between the labour market parties really warmed so as to enable cooperation on gender equality towards the end of the 1990s. She underlines that the task of the employers’ organisation in the tripartite law drafting process is to see to it that the legislation will be as functional from the point of view of business as possible, no matter what opinion a party may have on the issue itself.
Statistics Finland has furnished those involved in the gender equality work with facts; the person in charge of that has been Eeva-Sisko Veikkola. The first statistics from a gender equality and women’s point of view were produced in the 1970s. Also before that, a great deal of relevant information had been collected in various registers, but combining the pieces of information from a new perspective was something that was totally new at that time.
During the twenty years Finland has had four Ombudsmen for Equality. The first of them was Mr Paavo Nikula from 1987 to 1991. He laid the foundation for gender equality work. He also took part in the public debate and with his opinions laid down the lines for the interpretation of the Act.
The second Ombudsman, Ms Tuulikki Petäjäniemi had worked in various equal pay and job evaluation projects before being elected to the post of the Ombudsman for Equality in 1991, and she has continued with similar tasks also after her term in office ended in 1994. During her term in office the prerequisites for achieving solutions in equal pay issues, however, were not very good since Finland was deep in an economic recession. During her term women’s organisations assumed a sharper role in gender equality work. Until then there had prevailed a kind of ‘state feminism’ – NGOs used to ask the gender equality authorities about the situation rather than present their own views. Their attitude started to change partly as a result of the Nordic Forum and the UN’s Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing.
Ms Pirkko Mäkinen started as the Ombudsman for Equality on the same day as Finland became a member state of the European Union, on 1 January 1995. The amended Act on Equality between Women and Men took effect on the same day. The legislation had already been harmonised for several years with the EU. Many people, among them Pirkko Mäkinen, had had their suspicions about what will happen to Finnish gender equality after joining the EU. It was thought that there would be regression rather than progress. In the course of years it has, however, become evident that the EU has with its directives and the European Court of Justice with its interpretations backed the work for gender equality.
In 2002 Ms Päivi Romanov started her term in office and she still holds the post. Romanov has worked on the same themes as her predecessors, e.g. equal pay problems, the glass ceiling phenomenon – women’s proportion in leadership positions is increasing very slowly – and the high proportion of fixed-term employment relationships. Those began to increase during the years of recession but although the recession started to abate years ago, the phenomenon of temporary employment relationships still persists in Finland.
Dr.Soc.Sc. Raija Julkunen writes in her article that the Equality Act is mainly a gender-neutral act aiming to prevent gender-based discrimination in all situations in worklife. Men and women can appeal to the Act on an equal basis if they believe that they have been discriminated against on grounds of their gender. Apart from prevention of discrimination the Act aims to promote women’s status in work.
According to Julkunen it was significant that the supervision authorities: the Ombudsman for Equality with her/his office and the Gender Equality Board, were established in the context of the Act. In the first years the Ombudsman gave written opinions, advice and instructions amounting to about one hundred per year, and orally several times a day. In 2005 the number of contacts the Office received amounted to more than 1200, of which almost 1200 were dealt with.