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full screen The number of women in committee chair positions plummets. Archive image. Photo: Jakob Åkersten Brodén/TT
The number of women chairing the Riksdag’s committees has plummeted since the last election. Women now make up only 20 percent.
Since 2012, the proportion of women in top positions in the Riksdag’s committees has been 40–50 percent. However, after the 2022 election, the gender distribution has become strongly male-dominated, Statistics Norway’s equality report “Talking about women and men” shows.
“In the Riksdag, the gender distribution among the chairmen of the committees has been even for a long time, but is now uneven with 20 percent women and 80 percent men,” says Anneli Åkerman, researcher in gender equality statistics at Statistics Sweden.
There are 15 committees in Sweden that prepare decisions that the Riksdag then makes. The chairman leads the work and has the deciding vote if a vote ends in a tie.
In Sweden’s municipal council, the percentage of women has been around 40 percent for 30 years.
“However, we see that the number of municipalities with equal gender distribution in the council has decreased over time. In 2014, a fifth of Sweden’s municipalities had an uneven gender distribution, which increased to more than a quarter after the 2022 election,” says Anneli Åkerman.
FACT Three other points from the report
Women have lower wages, income and pensions. Women’s wages correspond to 90 percent of men’s. Their income is 79 percent of men’s and the pension corresponds to 74 percent.
The distribution of vab days taken has become more unequal in the last two years. Women take just over 60 percent of the working days and men just under 40.
Women take more parental leave than men. Last year, women accounted for 69 percent of parental leave and men for 31 percent. However, both women and men take fewer parental days. Women’s decreased by a total of 1.7 million days and men’s by 300,000 last year. This leads to the gender distribution being somewhat evened out.
Source: Statistics Sweden’s report “Speaking of women and men”
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