Sweden is widely regarded as a world leader when it comes to the gender pay gap.

Since 2009, employers have been legally required to report on the pay gap between men and women and publish action plans to address pay inequities. It has long been light years ahead of other countries when it comes to progressive parental leave and childcare policies, which lessen the career penalty that a woman pays on becoming a mother. It’s no surprise that Sweden ranks 5th in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report.

Yet all this wasn’t enough for researchers Marie Trollvik, Anita Harriman and Lena Johansson. After all, Sweden has not reached equality — the gender pay gap was still 11.1% in 2022. “We worked on these issues for our whole working lives. And when we retired, we refused to give up, because we felt that no one was taking this seriously,” Trollvik says.

After spending their careers working on the gender pay gap in different ways, Trollvik, Harriman and Johansson set up a consultancy which they named Lönelotsarna (roughly translating as “the wage pilots”). The aim was to continue holding Sweden and its employers to account. Since 2015, Lönelotsarna has published annual pay gap reports that specifically highlight pay differences between sectors. Minna Cowper-Coles, a gender pay gap expert from King’s College London, described the three women as “super geeks on calculating equal pay – but pay for work of equal value”.

Lönelotsarna looks at jobs across sectors and assesses them in a number of ways: how much education and experience is required; how much responsibility is involved; the physical and mental conditions of the role; what kinds of problem-solving and social skills are needed. The team then uses these metrics to organise all jobs into roles of equal value. Thanks to Sweden’s comprehensive salary data, Lönelotsarna can then compare every job in Sweden to expose the structural wage gap. “That’s the difference between ‘women’s jobs’ and other jobs,” Trollvik tells me.

Their reports consistently find that those in female-dominated professions in Sweden get paid less than male-dominated ones even when they require the same levels of skill, education or responsibility. For example, primary school teachers and social workers receive significantly less pay than police officers, even though they require more skill, knowledge and effort. Lönelotsarna has also found that midwives earn significantly less than civil engineers, despite both jobs being in high demand and requiring similar levels of education, skills, responsibilities and working conditions.

“In response to our data people always say, ‘Oh, it’s the market’. But our reports have proven that when there is a market need for female-dominated roles, these roles don’t see the pay increase that male-dominated roles do,” Trollvik says.

Mind the gap

Lönelotsarna’s work offers a good response to those who question that discrimination, stigma and patriarchal norms are behind the persistent gap between men’s and women’s wages. It demonstrates that market forces cannot fully explain the gender pay gap, even when the pay gap is “adjusted” to compare roles of equal levels of skill and responsibility. It also reveals the market’s huge undervaluation of care.

Attempts to measure and explain this gap have evolved several times over the past few decades. This really picked up in the 1970s, says Yana Rodgers, Director of Rutgers University’s Center for Women and Work. It was then, inspired by work on the racial pay gap, that experts started to try to measure gender pay gaps.

They did so by splitting the gap into two components: differences observed between men and women in education and experience, and differences that were “unexplainable” by these kinds of characteristics. “This is the portion that some people attribute to discrimination, and other folks, especially neoclassical economists who don’t believe in discrimination, would simply say, ‘this is unexplained – we don’t have the data, but if we did, we could explain away the gap,’” Rodgers says.

One innovation since then, she says, is to use field studies to try to measure discrimination more directly. This might involve sending in hundreds of fake job applications with recognisably male or female names, for example, in order to measure bias against female job applicants. But the focus there is still on equal opportunities within the same job.

Of course it’s important to determine whether a man and a woman with identical education, experience and skills are paid the same amount for the same position: if they aren’t, there is clear discrimination. But focusing on this, as early studies did, ignores the much more pervasive systemic issues that undervalue female-dominated professions (such as nursing). New Zealand and Canada were at the forefront of recognising this in the 1990s: feminists there began to demand not just equal pay for the same job, but for jobs of equal value.

Thirty years on, we’re not much closer to pay equity in most countries, even those heralded to be leaders in gender equality, as Lönelotsarna have shown.

Reproductive labour

Today, there are countless indices, such as the Global Gender Gap Report or the European Union’s Gender Equality Index, that attempt to measure gender inequality – a large component of which is made up by the pay gap – and compare them internationally. A lot of progress has been made. But “any of these indices need to be taken with a grain of salt,” says Rodgers. “A number of them, for example, use women’s labour force participation rates. But high female labour force participation isn’t necessarily a good thing if women’s job opportunities are limited to low-wage work”.

The issue is not only what experts term “occupational segregation”: the fact that female-dominated professions tend to be paid less. It’s that other factors regularly force women to relinquish their career ambitions, drop out of work entirely or to choose occupations that don’t pay very well. “The main explanation for the gender wage gap is care work, and women’s disproportionate role in providing that care,” says Rodgers.

This means that as well as looking at the extent to which women are overrepresented in low paying jobs, we also need to measure how much unpaid labour people do outside their waged work.

Very few gender equality indices properly factor in such work. In fact, most treat unpaid reproductive labour (for example, cooking, washing clothes and bearing and looking after children) exactly the same as they do leisure time. A 2022 analysis of 17 cross-country gender inequality indices found that only one – the African Gender and Development Index – stood out “in its explicit aim to address the invisibility of women’s unpaid work” by factoring in unpaid reproductive labour.

The closer you look at the gender pay gap, the more complicated it gets. There are so many factors at play: outright discrimination against women in the workplace; the fact that women dominate some professions and not others; the undervaluation of such professions; the motherhood penalty faced by women once they have children; the limited jobs open to women seeking part-time or flexible work. All of these are further exacerbated by other forms of discrimination and any could serve as the topic of a newsletter alone – and they will.

“It all boils down to the value of care,” says Rodgers. “If we’re all cognizant that the market either does not value care or undervalues care, then we realise that it’s each and every person’s responsibility to place more value on care and to demonstrate that on a day-to-day basis. I do think that would help to close gender pay gaps.”

To get a sense of what this looks like on a policy level, I spoke to a few experts and did some reading to understand what works, and what doesn’t:

What works

• Requiring employers to report data on relevant policies including parental leave and flexible working, as well as pay gap figures.

• Requiring employers to assess, report, and adjust wage disparities for work of equal value, not just for people doing the same job.

• Requiring employers to publish regular action plans on how they will work to address the pay gap.

• Holding employers accountable to these plans – not
  only by the government but also by their employees. In Spain and France, for example, employee representatives and trade unions both sign off on employer action plans.

• Investing in statutory parental leave (use it or lose it), affordable childcare and focusing on improving pay in female-dominated sectors like healthcare, education, and caregiving.

What doesn’t

• Only targeting large employers.
  Small to medium-sized businesses make up the majority of employers globally.

• Too much emphasis on reporting headline pay gap figures. This can prompt businesses to take counterproductive steps, such as outsourcing low paid jobs in which women are clustered (e.g. cleaners).

• Branding policies designed to help women navigate their careers alongside their care duties as targeted specifically at women. This can actually result in increased stigmatisation. Instead, policies should be gender neutral so that they attract any parent who does care work.

• Exclusively focusing on the gender pay gap. Data on other social categories (e.g. ethnicity, first language) should – with appropriate consideration of rights to privacy and cultural context – be collected to enable an intersectional approach.

Research Round-up

Here’s what else is making the news:

1. 🚺 “Femtech” healthcare start-ups using technology to target women’s issues are less likely to get funding if there is a
   woman on the founding team, according to research
2. ⛈️ A recent study looking at data from 156 countries details how storms, landslides and floods are associated with increased rates of intimate partner violence in the following two years.
3. 🌈 A US survey of 5,000 LGBTQ+ women found that a shocking 22% had attempted
   suicide. 66% reported seeking treatment for trauma.

About The Evidence

The Evidence is a supplement to the Impact newsletter designed to help you understand gender inequality – and show how we might fix it. Impact is a weekly newsletter of feminist journalism, dedicated to the rights of women and gender-diverse people worldwide.

This is the English version of our newsletter; you can read the French one here.