Feminist Perspectives on the Economy within Transforming Nordic Welfare States

With this Special Issue, we aim to carve space for a feminist and gender analysis of the economy (i.e. economic policies, governance, knowledge and economic questions more generally) and make this line of research more visible within the Nordic context. While of high societal importance and policy relevance, there is a lack of feminist analyses of the changing role of the economy in poslitics and society in Nordic countries. These economic influences include, among other things, the increasing role of the economy on the political agenda; neoliberal policies and labour market reforms; shifts in the way decisions about economic policy are made; and economic crisis and austerity and their gendered and racialized implications.

Nordic welfare states have been conceptualized as “women-friendly” (Hernes, 1987). Although their “women-friendliness”—and, more broadly, inclusiveness—has been contested on several grounds (Borchorst & Siim, 2002, 2008; Keskinen, Tuori, Irni, & Mulinari, 2016; Koskinen Sandberg, 2018), Nordic countries still do well in different gender equality rankings (e.g. World Economic Forum, 2020; see Einarsdottir, in this issue). Moreover, the ongoing processes of neoliberalization—visible in economic, employment, social and gender equality policies, governance and policy-making processes and welfare state employment—have dramatic impacts on the state’s ability to promote gender equality and value everyone’s work and well-being equally.

In the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis, the neoliberal project, a long-standing global phenomenon, has gained increased legitimacy in Nordic countries, intensifying the transition from a social-democratic welfare state to a neoliberal “competition state” (Kantola & Kananen, 2013, Kylä-Laaso & Koskinen Sandberg, in this issue). In addition to economic policies aiming at deregulation, reduction of public spending and marketization of public services, the neoliberalization of Nordic welfare states takes more subtle forms as processes of economization that disseminate economic values, priorities, practices and metrics to all areas of policy-making and state activity (Brown, 2015).

The recent austerity policies as well as the more long-term, neoliberal transformation of the State are gendered and racialized phenomena. Across Europe, women and minorities—in particular, minority women—have borne the brunt of cuts in public spending. Moreover, these cuts and the privatization and marketization of public services have refamiliarized and reprivatized care, thereby enhancing the crisis of social reproduction (e.g. Karamessini & Rubery, 2014; Bargawi, Cozzi, & Himmelweit, 2017; Kantola & Lombardo, 2017; Bakker, in this issue). This phenomenon has shifted gender regimes (Walby, 2015) and emphasized classed and racialized hierarchies between women (Bakker, 2003). Austerity has widened gendered economic inequalities and undermined the earlier dual earner—dual carer focus also in Nordic countries (e.g., Elomäki & Ylöstalo, 2018; Thorsdottir, 2013).

An important result of austerity and the connected neoliberal labour market reforms in Nordic countries has been the intensification, budget cuts, privatization and renegotiation of working conditions that affect the female-dominated public sector and welfare state employment (Adkins, Kortesoja, Mannevuo, & Ylöstalo, 2019; Kylä-Laaso & Koskinen Sandberg, in this issue). Moreover, the increasing marketization and outsourcing of public services has shifted care work from the public sector to both multinational corporations and small businesses, often headed and staffed by migrants (Brodin & Peterson, in this issue). One outcome of the weakening of working conditions and labour protections has been the growing gig economy, where migrant workers, particularly, who have difficulties in finding employment in the Nordic labour markets, work in precarious conditions (Webster & Zhang, in this issue).

Policy-making processes and the possibilities of different actors’ influences on them have been affected, too. In Nordic countries, as elsewhere, transformations of economic governance have transferred power from parliaments to masculine fiscal bureaucracy and have helped to make gendered and racialized austerity a permanent state of affairs (Elomäki, 2019; Klatzer & Schlager, 2019). Trade unions and employer organizations have had significant power in policy-making in the Nordic countries (e.g. Bergqvist, 1991; Koskinen Sandberg, 2018; Siaroff, 1999). Research from Finland indicates that, in the context of austerity, the state has strengthened its position vis-à-vis labour market parties (Kylä-Laaso & Koskinen Sandberg, in this issue). The shifts in economic policy and governance and the broader processes of economization have also had an impact on the possibility that traditional feminist actors and knowledge may influence policy-making, which is increasingly dominated by economic actors, issues and knowledge (Cavaghan, 2017; see Ylöstalo, in this issue).

These shifts in the Nordic welfare states take place in the context of the global political economy. Global inequalities have enabled the development of Nordic welfare states, and their neoliberal transformation is part of the global economic restructuring; the biggest losers in this restructuring are in the Global South rather than in Nordic countries. Moreover, the policies implemented in the Nordic countries have global effects. For instance, when racialized women from poorer countries increasingly fill Nordic care needs due to the state’s gradual withdrawal from the provision of care and the subsequent marketization of that care (e.g. Vaittinen, 2017, Brodin & Peterson, in this issue), care deficits are transferred elsewhere.

Feminist activism is also increasingly contesting neoliberal practices and institutions in Nordic countries. Online platforms and social media have made these collective efforts easier, allowing efficient feminist organizing and mobilization (e.g. Mendes, Ringrose, & Keller, 2018; Vachhani & Pullen, 2019). One example of such resistance is the NoPlayMoney social movement in Finland, which mobilized around questions regarding wages of early education teachers after it was revealed that three cities in the Finnish capital area had suppressed wages deliberately. As a result of this revelation and mobilization, many Finnish municipalities allocated wage increases to this feminized, low-paid occupational group, thus demonstrating that change is indeed possible, even during austerity. Also, gender budgeting (see Ylöstalo, in this issue) to contest and transform gendered economic policies has become increasingly popular in Nordic countries.

The articles in this Special Issue discuss the neoliberal transformation of Nordic economies and welfare states through case studies from different Nordic countries. The articles engage with different understandings of neoliberalism as policies, ideology and governance (cf., Larner, 2000), and they use theoretical approaches ranging from feminist economics to theories of depoliticization to illustrate how the ever-expanding economic rationality (cf., Brown, 2015) affects different aspects of Nordic welfare states in gendered and racialized ways.

Miikaeli Kylä-Laaso and Paula Koskinen Sandberg’s article “Affective Institutional Work and Ordoliberal Governance: Gender Equality in Parliamentary Debates on the Competitiveness Pact in Finland”, analyses a recent ordoliberal policy measure of the Finnish government—the Competitiveness Pact—and related legislative measures. Ordoliberalism, a variant of neoliberalism, entails a strong state which aims to protect the economy from interfering influences. The case of the Competitiveness Pact serves as an example of ordoliberal policy-making; the government took drastic measures to increase the competitiveness of the Finnish economy, which had been hard-hit by the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath, by lowering labour costs. The competitiveness measures caused a conflict between the government and labour market parties. In addition lowering labour costs and improving competitiveness, the Competitiveness Pact was an attempt by the government to implement institutional changes to the norms and relations of the corporatist system. Kylä-Laaso and Koskinen Sandberg show how the clear gendered impacts of these ordoliberal policy measures became a central point of conflict and resistance in the struggles between the government and trade unions.

Helene Brodin and Elin Peterson’s article “Equal Opportunities? Gendering and Racializing the Politics of Entrepreneurship in Swedish Eldercare”, analyses the neoliberalization of eldercare in Sweden. Swedish governments have argued that opening up the publicly funded eldercare sector to private providers would advance entrepreneurship by women and immigrants. The neoliberal promise to support women’s economic independence through entrepreneurship, however, has yet to deliver. Furthermore, in the context of policy-engineered business opportunities in publicly funded eldercare, immigrants have been encouraged to start up ethnically niched firms to meet the growing need—generated by an increasingly diverse older population—for culturally adapted care services. Most of the companies owned by women and migrants are small, low-profit companies struggling to survive the competition from the large, multinational care corporations dominating the private care market. Brodin and Peterson critically explore the ambiguity of the gender equality and ethnic diversity arguments used to justify private sector involvement in publicly funded eldercare in Sweden. Their findings show that the politics of entrepreneurship in the home care sector privilege entrepreneurs who reflect the white, masculine gendering of entrepreneurship and disadvantage those who deviate from the normative entrepreneur (i.e. women and immigrants).

Natasha Webster & Qian Zhang’s article “Careers Delivered from the Kitchen? Immigrant Women Small-Scale Entrepreneurs Working in the Growing Nordic Platform Economy”, provides an intersectional perspective into the exploration of the gig economy by examining immigrant women’s daily working experiences within a transactional gig platform: “Yummy”. This food app links home-based chefs to public consumers through online ordering systems. While the gig economy has been the target of much research recently, an intersectional perspective to understanding the gig economy is still mostly lacking. In Sweden, like in many other countries, several trends intersect (a) The gig economy is growing rapidly, (b) Immigrants find it challenging to find work, and (c) Integration policies increasingly focus on the role of the first job in Sweden as a benchmark for integration. In their article, Webster and Zhang explore the complexity of gendered and racialized precarious work from inside the gig economy; as data, they utilized in-depth interviews with chefs and the app management team and participatory observations at firm training sessions and food festivals. The findings demonstrate how gendered narratives of idle capacities and women’s work in the home and family spheres are marketized and transformed through the platform. Webster and Zhan’s article illustrates how gender, race and immigrant status intersect in the growing platform economy in the Nordics.

Hanna Ylöstalo’s article “Depoliticisation and Repoliticisation of Feminist Knowledge in a Nordic Knowledge Regime: The Case of Gender Budgeting in Finland”, shifts the focus to the realm of knowledge. Policy-making in the Nordic countries increasingly relies on scientific knowledge. Using a recent gender budgeting initiative in Finland as an example, Ylöstalo analyses the role, form and producers of feminist knowledge in policy-making. Ylöstalo shows that gender budgeting as a form of feminist knowledge-based advocacy is characterized by a constant movement between depoliticization and repoliticisation. Ylöstalo argues that the evidence hierarchies within the evidence-based policy movement are reflected in gender budgeting. In Finland, gender budgeting initiatives have favoured quantitative knowledge about distributional impacts that reduces gender equality to narrow notions of economic equality. Moreover, this focus has led to reliance on non-feminist statisticians and economists, with the effect of detaching gender budgeting from the feminist movement. In Finland, the reliance on numbers and economic expertise has helped to draw attention to the gender impacts of austerity; yet this knowledge only had a symbolic role in policy-making. Ylöstalo’s article illustrates how shifts in governance and policy-making economize feminist knowledge and, therefore, narrow the effects of the content of this knowledge and of whose voices are heard in policy-making.

Thorgerdur Einarsdottir’s article “All That Glitters is Not Gold: Shrinking and Bending Gender Equality in Rankings and Nation Branding”, takes us to postcrisis Iceland and turns our attention to the measurements and indices of gender equality. With a focus on Iceland and the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index (GGG), the article critically examines measurements and indices of gender equality as well as the way gender equality rankings are capitalized for nation-branding purposes. Iceland has retained first place in the GGG despite the gendered effects of the financial crisis, and the country’s ranking has been mobilized in the efforts to rebuild the country’s reputation. Einarsdottir’s article shows how indices affect the discursive construction of gender equality. The GGG “shrinks” the meaning of gender equality through assigning importance to some areas of gender equality while neglecting others and measuring these areas with narrow variables. In Iceland, this narrow understanding of gender equality was then “bent” for nation-branding purposes, with authorities turning a blind eye to the GGG’s limitations. Einarsdottir’s article sheds light on the limitations of gender equality measurements and illustrates how this kind of quantitative knowledge about gender equality—and gender equality itself—become selling points for governments and a tool of nation branding.

Vanja Carlsson’s article “Governance Structure and Ideology: Analysing National Administrative Conditions for Gender Equality in the EU’s Regional Policy”, turns attention to neoliberal understandings of gender equality and the role of governance processes in reinforcing or contesting such understandings. The article addresses these issues in the context of the European Union’s regional policy and one of its key funding instruments, the European Social Fund (ESF). The EU often approaches gender equality from the neoliberal economic growth perspective, and the article analyses the role of national ESF governance structures in reinforcing or challenging this economized interpretation of gender equality. By comparing Sweden and Spain, Carlsson shows that different ways of organizing and controlling gender equality policy affect the conditions for ideological policy outcomes. In contrast to previous feminist studies on bureaucracy, the article argues that a centralized, hierarchical organizational form and the use of rule-driven, mandatory control techniques can be beneficial for gender equality. At the same time, more flexible organizational forms with voluntary participation may lead to the neglect of feminist perspectives. Carlsson’s article highlights the importance of studying how shifts in governance processes and public administration affect gender equality policy and its implementation.

The Special Issue concludes with a discussion of the concepts and methods of feminist analysis of the economy. Isabella Bakker’s position paper “Variegated Social Reproduction in Neoliberal Times: Mainstream Silences, Feminist Interventions”, argues that analyses of neoliberal policies, intensifying globalization and the deepening power of capitalism must extend to social reproduction and everyday life. Bakker outlines the different ways in which feminist economics has linked everyday life with the highest levels of finance. She suggests that the perspective of social reproduction and everyday life is needed not only to assess the unequal outcomes of macroeconomic policies but also for envisioning forms of social reproduction that can transform gender and other intersectional gender inequalities in the future. Bakker’s contribution illustrates the importance of feminist economics and feminist political economy approaches in economic analyses.

Taken together, the articles within this Special Issue illustrate the multiple ways in which the ongoing processes of neoliberalization and economization—intensified by the 2008 financial and economic crisis—shape different areas of Nordic welfare states with gendered and racialized effects. At the time of this writing, a new economic crisis caused by the novel coronavirus is unfolding. The gendered, racialized and class-based effects of this crisis are yet to be seen, but it is already clear that the impacts are different than those of the 2008 crisis because the sectors and people first affected are different. At the same time, the pandemic itself changes gender regimes, as the work in childcare and primary education is shifted from the paid economy to the unpaid one. At the frontlines are the very same female-dominated welfare state employees, whose work has been systematically undervalued, and the public welfare services, which in mainstream economic discourses have been seen as too costly and ineffective.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.