Response to interpellation 2023/24:665 on pay gaps between women and men
Translated from Swedish by AI; the translation may contain errors. The Swedish text is the original.
Summary AI, written in advance
The debate concerns wage differences and economic equality. L prioritizes economic equality and wants women and men to have the same opportunities for economic independence 1. L considers economic freedom to be a fundamental prerequisite for individual freedom 2 and that the government takes measures to increase economic equality 2. L wants to broaden the debate to include life incomes, savings, and women's entrepreneurship 3. S argues that women's life incomes are significantly lower than men's 4 and that women's incomes plummet when they start a family 5. S wants the minister to look at measures in the final report from the Commission for Equal Life Incomes 5.
Written by AI in advance and may contain errors. The numbers lead to the speech a statement builds on; check against the text below.
Statsrådet Paulina Brandberg (L)
Madam Speaker! I have been asked whether I and the government intend to introduce the EU's pay transparency directive in a way that entails expanded opportunities to access the pay differences between women and men. The interpellator has also asked what initiatives I and the government are prepared to take to contribute to reducing the pay differences between women and men.
Let me begin by emphasizing that the government prioritizes economic equality. The goal is that women and men should have the same opportunities and conditions regarding paid work that provides economic independence for life.
The purpose of the so-called pay transparency directive is to strengthen the application of the principle of equal pay for women and men for equal or equivalent work through transparency in pay setting and compliance mechanisms.
The Government has tasked a special investigator with analyzing and assessing the compatibility of Swedish law with the directive. The investigator shall, based on among other things the Swedish labor market model, take a position on and justify what is necessary for the directive to be implemented in Sweden. The investigation shall report its findings no later than May 31, 2024.
The parties in the labor market indeed have the primary responsibility for wage formation. The Government safeguards the Swedish wage formation model and has great confidence that the parties take their responsibility.
The question of equal pay is linked to economic equality, and over the past year, the government has taken initiative on a long series of different agency assignments aimed at promoting economic equality. In the regulatory letters for 2024, assignments were given to several agencies on everything from remote work after the covid-19 pandemic, women's establishment in the labor market and equality in the housing market to analysis of life incomes. The government has also recently given an assignment to Tillväxtverket which, among other things, together with Jämställdhetsmyndigheten, shall carry out measures aimed at improving the conditions for women's entrepreneurship, ownership and business ownership.
Annika Strandhäll (S)
Madam Speaker! Thank you, Minister for Equality Paulina Brandberg, that we can have this incredibly important discussion here today!
Women's life incomes in Sweden are today approximately three-quarters of men's. Regardless of how one calculates, one ends up with that it concerns millions of kronor over a lifetime. When one adds up the incomes from work, business activities, capital, and transfers, one sees that there is a difference of around 6 million kronor in life income between women and men.
This is a gap that is due to several factors. One of them is, of course, all else being equal, that women still have lower work incomes than men do. It also creates ripples, because the work income also forms the basis for many other benefits such as pension, parental leave, and sickness benefits. In fact, even a small difference in wages can have large consequences over time, because wage increases usually occur proportionally.
Another partial explanation for why the gap becomes so large is that capital income over the last decades has grown significantly faster than labor income has, which benefits more men.
Just as the Minister referred to in connection with one of the assignments she pointed out, the covid pandemic and the subsequent economic crisis have also caused the development towards economic equality to take a real hit. Many women lost more income than men during the pandemic. Women consistently have higher sickness absence and increased parental leave (vab). During the covid pandemic, it was also more women who were laid off or furloughed, and after that, the economic crisis has hit hard.
The fact is that the rate at which men's and women's life incomes are approaching each other now means that they will not become equal until in 100 years. It is a development that stands in direct conflict with one of the gender equality policy goals, namely the overarching goal that states that men and women in Sweden shall have the same opportunities to shape their own lives and society. It is also therefore why I think the debate we have today is extremely important.
The Minister for Equality is also Deputy Minister for Employment and thus has broad responsibility for these issues. Several inquiries have been commissioned previously. As recently as 2022, the Commission for Equal Life Incomes submitted its final report. I would very much like to hear from the Minister for Equality in more specific terms regarding what ambitions exist and what one wants to implement in this area. We are soon halfway through the parliamentary term.
Statsrådet Paulina Brandberg (L)
Madam Speaker! I would like to thank you again for the debate. It is very important to talk about economic equality, because it constitutes a foundation in the entire equality policy. We know that if one does not have economic independence, it affects equality in many other respects. We can, for example, link this to our previous debate on violence in relationships. If one is economically dependent on their perpetrator, it is very difficult to leave the relationship. This is, therefore, a very important issue.
I also think it is positive that the interpellor highlighted life incomes in their post here, in contrast to the interpellation itself where the focus was solely on wage differences. I see it as a problem that we have historically looked at the issue of economic equality from an all too narrow perspective. Wage differences are very important to talk about, because of course it is not acceptable that we have the wage gap we have in Sweden. But economic equality is a much broader subject than that.
I and several Liberal Members of Parliament have, over the past months, conducted a large number of round-table discussions focusing on women's financial ownership. During these discussions and seminars, information has emerged that has been, for me, downright shocking. One of them is that there is research showing that when it comes to parents' savings for their children, they save more, in aggregate, for their sons than for their daughters. The economic inequality begins already in the diaper age. That says something about how deeply rooted this problem is. We therefore cannot stare blindly at the question of pay gaps. We must raise our gaze and look at this much more broadly. We must look at savings and all other incomes.
The interpellor does not mention, but which I also think we must place much more focus on, is women's entrepreneurship. Not everyone is a wage earner. Not everyone wants to be a wage earner. There are other ways to earn money. Even here, of course, equality must prevail. It does not. We know that less than 1 percent of venture capital goes to companies owned and operated by women.
When it comes to the proportion of companies with at least one employee that are run by women, Sweden is second worst in the EU, statistically speaking. It really shows that Sweden, which often sees itself as some kind of world champion in equality, has a homework assignment to do. We have a job to do to earn that reputation in all aspects of equality work.
In the next post, I will go into more concrete detail on what measures the government is taking in this regard, but I really want to emphasize the need to broaden the debate to include life incomes and all aspects of economic inequality.
Annika Strandhäll (S)
Madam Speaker! Thank you, the Minister for Equality, for the answer! It feels very reassuring that even the Minister for Equality has a broader view on this issue.
When I took office as Minister for Social Insurance in 2014, one of the first department reports I produced was an analysis of how the 30 percent pension gap between women and men that we have in Sweden is de facto built up over the years. It was analyzed where the gap arises and what it is due to. It was, of course, a rather complex picture, just as the Minister says, which concerns women's economic vulnerability from the diaper age to retirement. It was aggregated in the analysis.
One thing that I would also really like to take up in this context is what the Minister says about the enormous difference in women's and men's capital income in this country. That was why I pointed out in my first speech that this is a significant part of why women have lower lifetime incomes. We must work on several different perspectives simultaneously.
One thing that I would, however, like to point out, and which concerns how we analyze wage differences in this country, is how the Medling Institute does it. There, I would definitely like to say that we have a statistical problem. When the Medling Institute establishes its statistics today, they convert all jobs into full-time jobs in their comparisons. And who is it that works part-time? Yes, women. That in itself makes that statistics completely misleading.
The Medlings Institute also does not include the structural wage differences in the labor market in its statistics and analysis. We have pointed out and criticized this for several years. It is a comment from me as a former union chairman on the municipal civil servant side, which is a female-dominated area. As long as one does not weigh in both the part-time work and the fact that there are structural wage differences in the labor market in its statistical data, it is not at 16:12 that women's wages end, but significantly earlier in the day. That could be a tip when it comes to assignments to the Medlings Institute.
When it comes to structural wage differences, it is a fact, regardless of how one looks at the labor market and regardless of which sector or industry it concerns, that the occupations dominated by women are statistically lower paid across the entire labor market.
I now look forward to hearing the Minister's thoughts on this, but also which initiatives that will hopefully be able to be taken in this area.
Statsrådet Paulina Brandberg (L)
Madam Speaker! I promised in my previous contribution that I would return with concrete measures that the government is taking, and I will do so now.
One of the key issues in this, regardless of whether we are talking about wages, entrepreneurship, sickness benefit or parental benefit, is to address the unpaid home and household work. We know that women today still take much greater responsibility for this than men do, and it affects women in very many different ways. It affects women's participation in the labor market. It affects women's propensity to feel that they have the opportunity and time to run a business.
I claim that this is something that makes women have to manage two full-time jobs. We know that sick leave is much higher for women than it is for men, and it is not so strange when they have several different balls to keep in the air at the same time. It is actually not just an economic issue but also a health issue within the area of gender equality.
Here we now review the parental leave, among other things by increasing the number of double days and the possibility to transfer parental days to more people. We want to give more parents tools to combine parenthood and work life. This, I believe, is an important key to economic equality.
I also want to speak specifically about foreign-born women. Among those who are furthest from the labor market and who are most economically vulnerable, we see an overrepresentation of just foreign-born women. We need to take targeted measures for that group.
The government is working on several different fronts here. Among other things, we have been given a mandate to develop a joint agency plan to increase the entry of foreign-born women into the labor market. That was a government decision that was taken last year.
We have an agreement between the government and SKR on a joint initiative to reach out to foreign-born women who visit the open preschool because we see that it is a place where we can actually reach these women.
We also have a comprehensive policy to reduce segregation and increase integration into Swedish society so that more foreign-born people, not least foreign-born women, can enter employment and become a part of Swedish society in all parts.
In addition to this, we have measures regarding women's entrepreneurship. Just recently, on March 7, we made a decision on a powerful package to promote women's entrepreneurship. Tillväxtverket, together with Jämställdhetsmyndigheten and other actors, shall carry out initiatives that stimulate young women's entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship and carry out knowledge-raising initiatives for entrepreneurs and business-promoting actors. It is also a very important mission within this area.
We have also, in the regulatory letter for 2024, given a mandate to Mynak to investigate how increased remote work has affected equality.
These are some examples of measures that the government is taking to address economic inequality within several different areas.
Annika Strandhäll (S)
Madam Speaker! Thank you, the Minister for Equality, for the commitment in this area!
As the Minister began with, this is perhaps the most central area of equality - economic freedom for Sweden's women to be able to steer their own lives, regardless of what background one has, choose to leave if one is in a relationship that does not work, divorce and take care of one's children. It is far too many women in this country who state as a reason for not leaving a bad relationship that they do not know how they can stand on their own feet economically.
I mentioned to the Minister in my previous post the analysis we made of how the pension gap arises. When it comes to income development, it can be stated that women are in themselves at a somewhat lower level, but that women and men still follow a fairly similar curve until they start a family. Something happens there. There, women's incomes plummet, and that is due to several of the things that the Minister highlighted.
I usually say that working-class women work part-time even before they start a family because those jobs are often organized that way, in part-time, while white-collar women go down to part-time after they have had children to make the so-called life puzzle work and to manage. Both groups are in some way equally unfree.
There, women's sick leaves also increase, and the loss that women experience when they start a family, they never recover.
I mentioned some measures when I stood here last time. I just want to tip off the minister that in 2022, shortly before the change of government, the final report from the Commission on Equal Life Incomes was submitted. There are some really good measures in there. Look at it!
Statsrådet Paulina Brandberg (L)
Madam Speaker! Just as the interpellator says, economic freedom is a completely fundamental prerequisite for the individual's freedom to be able to steer their own life.
In my previous post, I mentioned some of the measures the government is taking to increase economic equality. I can add that we have also, in the regulatory letters for 2024, given a new mandate to the Gender Equality Authority to analyze the housing market from a gender equality perspective, because we know that housing is something that affects the economy incredibly much. If one does not have the economic means to acquire a new home, how can one then get out of, for example, a violent relationship or a relationship that one does not want to stay in for some other reason?
I would like to thank the interpellator for the debate and for the interpellator's commitment to this issue. The Government's work will continue with full force in all the areas that we have highlighted here today because this, as said, is a foundation and a prerequisite for us to be able to achieve a more equal society.
Source: The Swedish Parliament. The speeches come from the open data of the Riksdag, translated into English by AI, which may contain errors.