Gender equality at the crossroad of conservatism and neoliberalism: Right-wing women’s gender equality discourses in Finland

Gender equality and women’s rights are under attack in various national locations. These attacks include opposition towards feminist and gender equality policies and institutions, discrimination against LGBT+ people, and weakening women’s reproductive rights, for example. The attacks are often associated with the strengthening of populist right-wing, far-right and anti-gender politics and movement in various national contexts. However, there is little knowledge about populist right-wing women’s views on gender equality, especially in the Nordic context. In this paper we examine populist right-wing women’s gender equality discourses in Finland, a Nordic welfare state with long-standing gender equality policies and institutions. We analyze interview data with 19 current or former members of the populist right-wing Finns party. While these women often oppose gender equality policies, most of them see gender equality as an important value and promoting it has been an important motivator in their political careers. However, right-wing women have distinctive understanding of gender equality. We formed three gender equality discourses of populist right-wing women: neoliberal, conservative, and right-wing specific; the last is yet to be named. Our theoretical framework draws from earlier scholarships on neoliberal and conservative feminism, and their convergences. Although right-wing women’s gender equality discourses can be traced back to these feminisms, there are elements that seem specific to right-wing women, such as lack of protection from sexual harassment by their political opponents. We trace these specificities back to a conflict-ridden context of being a woman in a very male-dominated political party that openly opposes feminism and gender equality, in a broader Nordic political context in which gender equality is an important but contested social norm.