Even in Sweden female equality is elusive
By Jonathan Power
EBBEMALA, Sweden (JP): "Women hold up half the sky," said Mao Zedong, paramount chief of China's Long March and subsequent victorious communist dictatorship. Now his successors are about to play host to 50,000 women, who are determined to use the occasion of the World Conference on Women in Beijing to drive the fight for equality further along on its even more demanding great march.
They should come to Sweden! There may be no well-known quotable politician on the subject--the Swedes rarely brag and never boast--but, according to the just published Human Development Report, authored by the former finance minister of Pakistan, Mahbub ul Haq, for the United Nations Development Program, the Swedes have had more success in producing equality between the sexes than any other country on earth. Sweden is number one and hard on its heels for second, third and fourth places are three other Nordic countries, Finland, Norway and Denmark. (The U.S. is fifth and Canada ninth.)
Well, do come to Sweden. Here I am, during a glorious, cloudless summer with that ethereal Nordic light pluming through the dense pine forests and across the luminous lakes, making my bi-annual pilgrimage with my Swedish wife to her mother and sister. But, even in paradise, surrounded by Swedish women, I have to say that I note a lot of falling short.
Women in Sweden, as elsewhere in the world, have a longer working week than men--they work 1.75 hours more per week, according to this new report. (But in 1984, it was 4 hours more.) While men do more household work than anywhere else on the globe, from vacuum cleaning to scrubbing floors, they still spend 10.5 hours per week less on housework than women do. Swedish men, compared with most European and North American men, are rather good at dealing with babies--men on the street pushing the pram, no women in sight, are not uncommon. Nevertheless, women devote twice as much time to child care. When it comes to laundry, even the most emancipated of men fall short. In Sweden they practically avoid it, spending a mere 20 minutes a week on this task. That is Swedish men.
On the women's side, old stereotypes continue. I won't bore you with more statistics. More interestingly, perhaps, we just had yesterday a family contretemps over my role. Last week my sister-in-law was in hospital. My wife and I spent three whole days tidying, cleaning out and scrubbing her very run-down house. When she returned from hospital, she ignored my household domestic contribution, assumed it was all her sister's work, and wanted to know why I hadn't removed all the broken branches in the garden. When my wife protested, she rounded on her saying the neighbors would be shocked to see women dragging these down the lane to the forest.
As you might expect, art and literature in Sweden excel on the passing and provocations of the male/female relationship. Not for nothing is August Strindberg's greatest play The Father, and cinematographer Ingmar Bergman is spending a long and fruitful life chronicling every pain-filled tearing of the fabric of relationships across the great sexual divide.
Nevertheless, this new report tells us that much of the rest of the world, consciously or unconsciously, has its sights on achieving a Swedish-style nirvana. Doubtless, if certain women, now trekking to Beijing, had their way a great leader, preferably female, would be fashioning an Aryan society on Scandinavian principles, making sure that men the world over are brought up to the Swedish mark. I would contend, however, that real equality is perhaps an elusive goal and it is better to settle for progress than some finite target.
If we look at it that way, we can, in fact, get quite encouraged, especially in many Third World countries. Considerable progress has been made over the last two decades in closing the gap between male and female in both education and health. Female life expectancy in the poorer countries increases by 20 percent faster than male. Fertility rates declined by a third. The gap in educational achievement has been halved. Even the most conservative part of the Third World when it comes to women, the Arab states, doubled their female literacy rates, out- performing everyone else.
In east Asia, female representation in parliament is one and a half times larger than it is in the industrialized countries. Barbados, a black-run Caribbean country, surpasses, in the Human Development Report's league table of achievement, many industrialized countries. And Hong Kong, Brunei and Singapore are hard on its heels.
This is progress. The female world is being transformed from how it was even 20 years ago. But poverty everywhere, in both the Third World and the industrialized countries, still has a female face. Seventy percent of the world's 1.3 billion poor are female. Averaged out, women work 13 percent more hours per week than men, and in rural areas this goes up to 20 percent.
"No society can progress half-liberated and half-chained," says author Mahbub ul Haq, "Human development, if not fully engendered, is fatally endangered." Wise words, I think, despite my personal knock. The Swedish muses might -- or might not -- agree with that.