“Må bäste man vara kvinna” : En studie av Försvarsmaktens jämställdhetsarbete och kommunikation

The Swedish Armed Forces is Sweden’s second to largest government agency, employing more than 20 000 people. Today, only a fifth of the personnel is female. This, even though women have had full access to the organisation since 1989, and the basic military training has been gender neutral since 2010. The Swedish Armed Forces is aiming to achieve equality by recruiting more women, but they have not been successful in their pursuit. With a theoretical background in Moss Kanter’s and Hirdman’s feminist theories, as well as critical discourse analysis, control documents were analysed using Fairclough’s three-dimensional model. We chose three campaign images intending specifically to recruit young women to the Swedish Armed Forces. By pursuing focus group interviews with young women eligible for basic military training, focusing on the campaign images, we found that physical and biological differences between men and women are very potent in the young women’s perception of the Swedish Armed Forces and their campaigns. Focus group interviews were analysed using content analysis. Based on the completed analyses, we could derive that the Swedish Armed Forces is constructing two different types of equality: quantitative and qualitative. The definition of the two differs extensively. Quantitative equality is more detailed, giving it a central and more prioritised position in the agency. The vague concept of qualitative equality is also considered in the focus group discussions, where the young women favor clarity and directness