Implementing Equal Pay Policy in a Right Wing Context: Clash between Gender Equality and Corporatism

The aim of this paper is to focus on an exceptional case of implementing equal pay policy in Finland. The case of Finland is internationally significant as it illustrates the ways in which corporatism resists the implementation of gender equality policy and results in the disappearance of the government’s firmly articulated gender equality objective. In 2007, the right wing National Coalition Party made an election promise to ‘Nancy the Nurse’ (the generic figure of the underpaid highly educated female nurse) to increase her salary by ‘500 euros’. After the elections, the nurses’ trade unions held the new prime ministerial party into account for its election promise. This led to the exceptional policy process where the government overrode the traditional corporatist system where pay is agreed upon between social partners, and dictated these organisations to give a pay increase to highly educated women in demanding tasks. In other words, in this case we have a highly exceptional gendered policy decision and in this paper we are interested in the dramatic failures in its implementation. Our key research questions are: was gender equality realized in practice and were there increases in the nurses’ pay and a reduction in the gender pay gap? Here we pay particular attention to issues of gender, ethnicity and class that explain the rather bleak answer to this question. Indeed, we argue that this case produced starker class based contradictions and contentions among different women in the public health sector. Second, we ask, which factors led to the failure in the implementation. We focus on the role of male dominated corporatist processes, trade unions and employers organisations, discursive structures and ask what happens to the gender equality perspective in the implementation process. Our research material consists of media stories, interviews with key actors and policy documents.