Swedish professionals and gender inequalities

The match of ideology and policy regarding gender equality in a corporatist society like Sweden should result in reduced gender inequality in access to supervisory authority and in earnings. The magnitude and form of this inequality is studied for a national sample of 1,359 full-time members of the professional union SACO in 1987–88. We find that Swedish professional women have only 68% of the supervisory positions that men have and 77% of the earnings that men have. These differences are not explained by process differences; human capital, family status, and structural variables generally produce access to authority and earnings similarly for men and women. Although there are mean resource differences in human capital and structural resources that disadvantage women and thus partly explain the gaps, the major factor explaining these gender gaps is occupational segregation. However, even when men and women are equalized on occupation and other explanatory variables, a gap favoring men is still found