How gender equal is your municipality?
Short answer: Women earned 84 percent of men's earned income in 2024 and receive 75 percent of their pension. Men take 31 percent of parental leave days, and 43 percent of council members are women.
What women and men earn.
Who stays home with the children.
Parental insurance, child benefit and preschool over time are on Family policy.
Sick leave and life expectancy.
Who went on to further studies.
Women among local politicians.
Paternity leave, the child penalty and power.
In 1974 Sweden became the first country in the world with parental insurance that both parents could use. Even so, fathers took almost none of it for a long time. What has shifted the take-up is days reserved for each parent: one month in 1995, two in 2002 and three in 2016. Since 2019 men have taken about 30 percent of the days, and the share is rising slowly.
Neighbouring countries have moved in the same direction, several of them faster in recent years. Since 2021 Iceland has split leave equally, with six months per parent, and in 2022 Finland gave both parents the same number of days. Denmark scrapped its short father’s quota in 2002 and started earmarking again in 2022, when the EU Work-Life Balance Directive required at least two non-transferable months per parent.
Research is fairly consistent about what it achieves. Reserved days get more fathers to stay at home, and in Norway this spread to brothers and colleagues. However, they rarely change how the couple shares work and care afterwards. A large part of the income gap between women and men builds up after the first child arrives.
Time reserved for each parent in the Nordics
| Country | Reserved for each parent | Fathers' share of the days |
|---|---|---|
| Sweden | 90 days since 2016 | About 30 percent since 2019 |
| Norway | 15 weeks since 2018 | About 22 percent for children born 2017, couples where both are employees |
| Denmark | Eleven weeks since 2022 | 14 percent for children born 2021, couples where both took leave |
| Finland | Equal days per parent since 2022, some transferable | About 11 percent before the reform |
| Iceland | Six months since 2021, six weeks transferable | Three of nine months were reserved for the father before the reform |
Sources: Försäkringskassan, Statistics Norway, Statistics Denmark and the Nordic Council of Ministers report State of Nordic Fathers (2019). The countries count days differently, so the shares are only roughly comparable.
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Do fathers take more leave when days are reserved?
Yes, clearly. The daddy month of 1995 sharply raised fathers' take-up from the first year. In Norway a man was more likely to take paternity leave when a brother or coworker had just done so, so the effect spreads.
Ekberg, Eriksson and Friebel (2013), Journal of Public Economics. Dahl, Løken and Mogstad (2014), American Economic Review.
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Do couples share more equally afterwards?
Less than one might think. Fathers affected by the daddy month did not take a larger share of caring for sick children in the years that followed. Nor did the Norwegian father quota shift parents' working hours toward a more equal split.
Ekberg, Eriksson and Friebel (2013). Cools, Fiva and Kirkebøen (2015), Scandinavian Journal of Economics.
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How are mothers' earnings affected?
Each month the father is on parental leave is associated with almost 7 percent higher annual earnings for the mother four years later, and the association is stronger than when the mother shortens her own leave by the same amount. The estimate is based on comparisons over time and not on a clean experiment.
Johansson (2010), IFAU working paper 2010:4.
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How are the children affected?
When Norway introduced the father quota in 1993, children got somewhat better school results at age 16, especially in families where the father had more education than the mother.
Cools, Fiva and Kirkebøen (2015), Scandinavian Journal of Economics.
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Why does the income gap persist?
Fifteen years after the first child, the income gap within Swedish couples has grown by 32 percentage points and the wage gap by 10, to the man's advantage. When occupation, sector, age, education and working hours are accounted for, a wage gap of under five percent remains; the rest is mostly about women and men working in different occupations.
Angelov, Johansson and Lindahl (2016), Journal of Labor Economics. Swedish National Mediation Office, The pay gap between women and men 2024.
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What happens to the relationship?
Two Swedish studies suggest that equality can chafe in traditional couples. Couples covered by the daddy month separated somewhat more often, mainly the more traditional ones. Women promoted to top jobs in politics divorce twice as often as women who were not, but not men, and not women in more gender-equal couples.
Avdic and Karimi (2018), American Economic Journal: Applied Economics. Folke and Rickne (2020), American Economic Journal: Applied Economics.
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Do quotas make politics worse?
No, rather the opposite. When the Social Democrats decided in 1993 to alternate women and men on their lists in municipal elections, the competence of the elected men rose where the share of women increased most, mainly because weak male leaders had to make way.
Besley, Folke, Persson and Rickne (2017), American Economic Review.
Where the figures come from.
- Source: Kolada. Income, pay, parental benefit, VAB, sickness rate, ill health rate, life expectancy, education and elected representatives per municipality, originally from Statistics Sweden and the Swedish Social Insurance Agency.
- Source: Swedish Pensions Agency. Average total pension by sex and municipality.
- Source: SCB (CC BY 4.0). The years before Kolada's series: earned income, education, women on the municipal council and net income per municipality, life expectancy and men's share of parental benefit and temporary parental benefit for Sweden.
- Our own processing of data from Kolada and the Swedish Pensions Agency: in the bars, women's value as a percentage of men's.
- Not included: the share of women among managers. Statistics Sweden's occupational register splits managers by sex per county and for Sweden, but not per municipality.
Nothing is estimated by us except the ratios under own processing. Click a municipality in the bars for its own page.