More Swedish Women Take Jobs

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31206, 2 November 1966, Page 6

More Swedish Women Take Jobs

(N.Z.P. A. -Reuter) STOCKHOLM. Women are making an important and steadily growing contribution to Sweden’s economy. The number of gainfully employed women, especially married women, is increasing steadily.

While the number of married women doubled from 1940 to 1960, when the last census was held, the number gainfully employed increased by 260 per cent. A labour force survey in 1961 reported that 45 per cent of married women aged between 20 and 44 were gainfully employed. It forecast that by 1970 the figure would probably be 50 per cent. Most women are to be found in clerical, industrial, retrail trade, domestic service, health service and teaching jobs. But they no longer keep to the traditional occupations of women. In spite of a post-war boom in marriages, 43 per cent of secondary schoolteachers and 25 per cent of ail dentists are women. So are 6 per cent of all judges and lawyers. In 1960, the nation’s first three women priests were ordained. Today, there are more than a dozen. The number of women students at universities has increased greatly in the last 15 years. Total enrolment in 1961 was about 40,000, compared with about half that figure eight years previously. Female students numbered 14,000, compared with about 5000 in 1953. In many jobs, however, women still do not enjoy

equal pay with men, especially in the lower-paid professions. Intense campaigning by women is slowly forcing many employers to adjust their salary scales and it is expected that women will achieve equal pay everywhere in the next five or 10‘years. One reason for the difference in pay, employers say, is that women generally appear to be less stable and reliable as employees. Research, they add, has shown that women often have a low’er rate of qualified training, a higher rate of leaving their jobs because of marriage or motherhood, and a tendency to be sick too often and not to arrive at work on Saturdays or Mondays. But ih spite of such allegations, the old slogan “a woman’s place is in the home” is definitely a thing of the past in Sweden. A Swedish woman’s choice is no longer between home and job. More and more women are taking top jobs. Sweden, which was one of the first countries to give women the vote, had its first woman member of Parliament in 1921. Now there are 47, or 14 per cent. More journalists in Stockholm are women than ever before, and in the cultural world, Swedish women have made their mark in almost all fields. In 1939, laws were passed

making it impossible for employers to dismiss women because they became engaged or got married, and in 1946, this legislation was extended to pregnancy and childbirth, Now, employers must give women Six months off work with pay when they have a child. After that, the woman is bound to return to her job for another six months. Courts recognise husbands and wives as equal partners, and the work done by a housewife is considered a material asset to the home. The wife today is half-owner of all that is in the home, unless she has signed an agreement with her husband that he is full owner, or vice versa.