Editorial

We are proud to present the first issue of NORA for 2024, containing six peer reviewed papers and one book review. The topics of the research papers are interconnected, focusing on gendered labour, the gender pay gap, gender equality policies, evaluation of care work, and gendered aspects of palliative care. Four of the papers are based on studies made in Sweden, while two are from Finland.

Heini Kinnunen discusses debates in news media in Finland about nurses‘ wages during the COVID-19 pandemic in “Wages for Care Work: COVID-19 and the Public Struggle for Nurses‘ Wage Equality”. The underlying issues are the longstanding gendered pay gap as well as consistently low wages for care work, which became prominent during the COVID-19 pandemic when care workers were under increased pressure and the importance of their work became more evident. Three important discourses on the objective of pay rises in the care sector are identified in the paper: the first concerning the experiences of frontline care professionals as an economic-political issue; the second on the ideal of the common good in the corporatists debate on care professionals‘ collective economic interests; and the third presents expert analyses of structural causes behind both the gendered segregation of the labour market and economic undervaluation of care work.

In their paper “Exploring Sustainability in Parliamentary Gender Equality Work. Insights from the Swedish Riksdag”, Josefina Erikson & Lenita Freidenvall consider internal gender equality work in the Swedish parliament, the Riksdag, with a focus on the sustainability of such work. The aim of gender equality policy in this context is to make parliaments gender equal and increase diversity. Sweden has been praised for its success in this respect, making its parliament an interesting and apt venue for study. Erikson and Freidenvall studied documents from the Riksdag as well as interviews with MPs from the period between 1994 and 2022. Their finding is that the Riksdag has successfully managed to conduct sustainable equality work over three decades, even though there has been some variance in ambition and focus.

The gender pay gap has long been a source of worry and has proven to be persistent in spite of attempts to eradicate it. Minna Salminen-Karlsson and Anna Fogelberg Eriksson apply critical discourse analysis to gender pay audit reports submitted by Swedish municipalities in “Men are Always Better? How Swedish Municipalities Justify Pay Differences in Gender Pay Audit Reports”. They focus on explanations provided by municipalities for salary policies regarding gender pay gaps, salary differences between individuals, salary differences between groups, and how municipalities as public sector employers relate to gender pay differences in relation to the private sector. They find that justifications for pay differences are frequently offered, such as by describing men‘s tasks as special and demanding while such descriptions are not to be found for women doing the same work. They claim that essentialist notions of gender characteristics and resulting gender segregation are mirrored in these texts.

Tomas Mitander’s paper “Undoing the Regional Demos? Gender Equality and Economic Growth in Regional Development” explores the intersection of feminism and neoliberalism in regional development policy in Sweden with respect to policy goals of gender equality and economic growth. While equality has been prioritized and institutionalized as a policy goal in the field of regional development in Sweden for the past three decades, the field of regional development has over the same period come to adopt an increased emphasis on economic growth and competitiveness. Mitander‘s analysis shows three representations of the convergence of gender equality and economic growth: reciprocity, co-optation and as Trojan horses. The study shows that feminist emancipatory goals cease to be legitimate in their own within this policy and require further justification as being beneficial for economic growth or become buried within marketized language.

In “Revisiting the Second Shift—Rethinking Value in the Outsourcing of Social Reproduction”, Elisabeth Wide and Lena Näre present their in-depth analysis of employers of migrant care and domestic workers in Finland. They examine the link between outsourcing social reproduction and the valuation of time by approaching these employers as workers who themselves labour to produce surplus value and show that they work a second shift of paid employment in the evening, enabled by the outsourcing of reproductive labour. Their conclusion points to a valuation of time constructed in relation to outsourcing social reproduction. Furthermore, they approach employers of domestic workers as workers who struggle within time to meet the demands of increasing productive labour-time. How these upper-middle and middle-class workers organize their social reproduction thus depends on a complex process of valuation of time, labour and capital.

Jamie Woodworth’s paper “Building Death Literacy Through Last Aid: An Examination of Agency, Ambivalence and Gendered Informal Caregiving Within the Swedish Welfare State” is a reflection on the implementation of Last Aid, a form of health-promoting palliative care (HPPC) in Sweden. Last Aid provides education on end-of-life issues and promotes increased agency for those providing palliative care for a significant other. Data shows that women disproportionately perform informal caregiving for seriously ill loved ones in circumstances of diminishing state care services. However, the findings indicate that the implementation of Last Aid is characterized by a tension between norms of institutional caregiving versus community caregiving and that increased pressure on women to provide care is not problematized.

Finally, in “Can ‘We’ Survive Ourselves?”, A. Samuel Kimball writes a review of The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind by Judith Butler.

The editors hope that readers will enjoy this selection of papers in those final winter months, as we send our greetings from snowy Iceland.