Currently reading Sund (2015) on “Just an illusion of equality? The gender diversity paradox in Norway”

Having lived in Norway for 3 years during my postdoc, and now in Sweden for the last 3.5 years, I am often frustrated how many people misunderstand the consistently high rankings in international comparisons of gender equality as actual gender equality. Yeah, maybe it is worse in most other places, but based on my personal experience both in Norway and in Sweden, there is still a pay-gap, a lot of microaggressions against women in STEM, very traditional ideas about division of domestic and emotional labour even in the workplace… And this is investigated in Sund (2015).

Sund (2015) start out by explaining typical reasons for male dominance (in their case in management): People tend to have (unconscious) biases that lead to hiring and promotion of people who are more like us, power structures typically work to keep the powerful in power, so men stay overrepresented in positions of power. In Norway, there have been gender quotas in companies mandated by law since 2006, and “legislation intended to ensure gender equality” since 1978. Yet, Sund (2015) cites studies finding that “Women remain underrepresented in jobs associated with influence, money, and decision-making power, and they still receive lower pay than their male counterparts in most jobs“. So there is a mismatch between values (“gender equality as an ideal that is taken for granted” — which definitely agrees with my experience) and practice.

First, “Why should we care about diversity?” Sund (2015) suggests that we need to distinguish between demographic diversity (gender, age, ethnicity, … — which are often argued for because of social desirability or because of opportunities for individuals) and cognitive diversity (where a greater diversity of experiences, values, behaviour patterns leads to a better understanding of customer needs, more innovation, etc, and thus simply makes sense financially). Sund (2015) points out that people leaving because of “poor integration of a diverse workforce” is a cost factor for companies. “In short, diversity has bottom-line impact and should be treated like any other business investment“.

So why is there still a gender gap in Norway? Sund (2015) discusses four theoretical approaches:

• Role theory: Culturally, men are attributed with intrinsic qualities that are assumed to lead to the type of behaviour that are commonly associated with good leaders. Not conforming to gendered stereotypes comes at a cost (for women for example being seen as too aggressive, not feminine enough, makes them troublemakers rather than leaders, even if they are behaving less aggressively than men who are perceived as assertive and strong leaders for the same behaviour), but conforming also comes with a cost — not being seen as a suitable leader. But this is based on mostly US research, whereas in Norway, the stereotype of a good leader is a bit more gender neutral.
• Managerial cognition, i.e. homosocial reproduction: People tend to hire people that are like them and that come from within their networks of people who are like them, so men hire more men.
• “Doing” gender: Gender isn’t something that exists within individuals, but is socially constructed; often with male and female as mutually exclusive profiles. People can choose to (tactically) play with roles (for example, I know a lot of dads that happily took time off, officially to be with their young children, but de facto to have more time to work on publications away from the office…).
• Values: Values are assumed to be similar across humans, but prioritised in different ways. And here we also come to the problem of social desirability (“…what people actually desire versus what they think they ought to desire“), and of course, even if equality was a real desire, “It is not necessarily easy, however, for an individual to bridge the gap from the abstract mental representation of a value to actually applying it in concrete judgments and actions“. Thus “While the values are considered important, they are still overridden. It is possible that this might be the case for equality within the Norwegian cultural context.“

In conclusion, Sund (2015) argues that “gender equality in Norway is perhaps more of an illusion than reality. Equality appears to be a commonly held value, but this is not reflected in the actual gender diversity situation. Perhaps it is time to stop claiming that Norway is such a gender equality paradise and instead focus our efforts on measures that can actually change this situation?”

I find this article very interesting because in my experiences living and working in Scandinavia, people get very offended when the gender equality in society and the work place is put into question (maybe especially by a foreigner like me). This now makes a lot more sense; of course nobody likes being told that what they do in practice is in conflict with the values they state and hold, and the identity that people have collectively held for a long time. But this article helped me understand how this paradox can exist, and maybe will make it easier to talk about gender equality in Scandinavia in the future. We’ll see!

In other news: Amazing wave watching yesterday! Here, you see a shallow beach and waves running on it. Can you spot where it is especially shallow?

There is this area where the wind waves start being dominated by feeling the seafloor, and as shallow water wave speeds depend only on water depth, suddenly wave crests become a lot more well-defined and form this chequerboard pattern where they cross each other where two wave fields run over the shallow bit each from their own side.

Isn’t this so cool, to suddenly have such a different wave pattern seemingly out of nowhere, or, the other way round, how much you can say about the seafloor just by looking at a wave field?

Sund, B. (2015). Just an illusion of equality? The gender diversity paradox in Norway. Beta, 29(2), 157-183.