Citizens, scholars, and students may wonder, is there any country in the world that we can look to for leadership on crafting gender equality into a national parliament? The short answer is yes, and the country is Sweden. But as Lena Wängnerud's detailed analysis of the Swedish parliament shows, this has not happened easily, or simply because the percentage of women increased from 14% in 1971 to 44% in 2014. The critical factors have been party realignments on gender issues in the 1994 election and the hard work of self-defined champions of women in parliament, which in some policy areas has plateaued.
Creative scholars have tackled the question of the conditions under which increased women's descriptive representation, or numerical presence in elected office, leads to increased women's substantive representation, or responsiveness to a particular conception of what women want out of public policy. Although some research demonstrates that female politicians notably advanced policies for females, like health care access and public child care (Bratton and Ray Reference Bratton and Ray2002; Thomas Reference Thomas1994), the literature also suggests that parties constrain how much even motivated feminist backbenchers can achieve in a given session (see O'Brien Reference O'Brien2015, 1024). It is difficult for political parties, let alone a diverse cross-partisan group like women, to agree on and pass gender-sensitive legislation. Therefore, the author's key contribution is a call for researchers to pivot to a new broader and more realistic conceptualization of what gender equality looks like in government.
A “gender-sensitive parliament” is an institution in which (1) women are able to influence internal parliamentary working procedures as much as men, (2) there is room for women's interests and concerns on the political agenda, and (3) where there is adequate production of gender-sensitive legislation. While the last item resembles prior work on substantive representation, the larger framework of the gender-sensitive parliament recognizes that female members of parliament (MPs) work as individuals and within their parties to try to make the parliament itself more open to women members in terms of working hours and meeting times. Moreover, female MPs who are “self-defined champions of women's interests” by voicing previously marginalized gender issues like gender pay equity in committee meetings, have engaged in substantive representation, even if responsive legislation addressing these issues never makes it out of committee.
Wängnerud's analysis of gender-sensitive legislation from 1842 to 2011 shows that while gender-sensitive legislation was passed in Sweden's early decades, it occurs more frequently after women entered the parliament in meaningful numbers. In 1842, male feminist allies were critical in enforcing that both girls and boys have access to public primary education. However, the 1974 law entitling men as well as women to receive a parental allowance for taking care of small children, a law that could actually challenge traditional gender norms about female responsibility for child care, came about because female MPs built coalitions to pass this legislation, despite an uphill battle.
Wängnerud first builds her case by looking outside the walls of the parliament. She uses longitudinal Swedish National Election Surveys to show that female Swedes have emphasized social policy while male Swedes have supported economic and tax policy. The Riksdag's insufficient focus on social policy in the 1970s and 1980s, and media and scholarly attention on the first reduction of the percentage of women in office in 1991 showed the public that the parliament was out of step with Sweden's changing gender equality norms.
Female leaders like Maria-Pia Boethius responded by forming a feminist group called Support Stockings. This group threated to form a political party, and 23% of Swedes said they would vote for it and support Boethius as prime minister. In response, parties ranging from the leftist Social Democratic Party to the center-right Liberal Party quickly reformed their platforms and leadership practices to respond to the group's demand that women have “half the power.” What resulted was a new two-party system in Sweden with a leftist bloc and a center-right bloc that largely agreed that women and men should have equal representation in politics and society. The cohort of MPs elected in 1994 held on to their feminist beliefs over time, in the following year enacting the Daddy Month, 30 use-it-or-lose-it days of paid paternity leave. As of January 1, 2016, fathers receive 90 days of paid leave to care for new children.
Nonetheless, there is room for progress. Female MPs are still dissatisfied with parliamentary working conditions. They operate in a system where a “good” party member can only be one who is willing to give up all of his/her time to the party, to the detriment of other interests. Female MPs decry the backstabbing and game playing within their own parties, and sometimes choose not to run again. Although women's issues, such as violence against women and sexual harassment, have appeared on the political agenda, they have not received adequate attention. In terms of gender-sensitive legislation, Swedish women overwhelmingly support proposals for a ban on pornography and a mandatory six-hour workday. While an increasing number of Swedish firms are experimenting with a six-hour workday, male MPs, and to a lesser degree female MPs, have not championed these issues.
The author also tests her findings at different levels of analysis. At the subnational level, Swedish local councils with higher numbers of women are significantly more likely to have mothers and fathers use parental leave policy. However, women's descriptive representation was not found to be associated with support for gender pay equality. Cross-national stepwise analysis shows that the factor that consistently predicts gender equality worldwide is a country's possession of social and economic rights for women, which matters more than the number of women in parliament. A general criticism of Wängnerud's analysis of the 1994 election is that it is difficult to separate the societal awareness that Sweden needed to change its political institutions by electing more women from the elite awareness that parties had to change their recruitment, leadership, and platforms. It seems a zeitgeist in 1994 Sweden drove both, and women's advocates around the world wish to know how to replicate it at both the societal and elite level.
