Highly-paid women still relatively few and far between in Finland
Even at the upper income levels, women only securing 80-90% of male earnings
Sari Baldauf
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The assault of female executives on high-salary positions looks to have failed to materialise in the past five years. According to a study carried out by Helsingin Sanomat on taxable earned income, only barely more than one in ten of the thousand highest-earning Finns are women.
The share of the fairer sex in the top 1,000 in terms of earned income has for all practical purposes remained unchanged between 1999 and 2003.
If we turn instead to capital income, the share of women is roughly doubled, or about 20-23%. Again, there has been no real change in the state of play over the past five years.
What sort of women are making it into the uppermost earnings bracket?
Until the year before last, the list was populated by Nokia options millionaires, but last year a good many others made it onto the Top 1000 lists.
The highest paid female executive was Sari Baldauf, EVP and General Manager of Nokia Networks, who made it up to #14 in the overall table, but other disparate routes to big earnings included the Moomintroll merchandising business, arranging horse-training courses, and the pharmaceuticals sector. A number of female pharmacists also make it into the Top 250, but this is somewhat misleading as their taxable income figures include those of the pharmacies they own.
The best way of getting to the top of the capital income pile is by being born into the right family. This is the way things were last year, too, when the heirs to the Erkko, Fazer, von Rettig, Herlin, and Ehrnrooth family fortunes hung on to the highest positions.
Inherited wealth can be in the form of listed stocks and shares or real estate, the yield or capital gains on which are categorised as capital income.
Well-timed investments in Nokia stock have also produced hefty dividend windfalls.
Women need to be a couple of years older to climb into the lists than their male counterparts. The average age of men in the Top 1000 of earned income over the five-year period was 50 years, while for women it was 52.
On the capital income side, the men were usually a shade under 60 years old, while the women were again a few years older.
According to a local saying, a woman's euro in the labour market is worth approximately 80 cents. There is more than a hint of truth in this, even at the rarified levels of the top earners. Women in the lists average around 90% of the earned income figures of their male counterparts, and around 80% of the capital income.
This is not to say that any of them are exactly strapped for cash: even in the lowest of the five years from 1999-2003, the average earnings of the women in the Top 1000 were around EUR 365,000. At the lowest ebb, the corresponding capital income figure for the women in the list was around EUR 1 million.
Helsingin Sanomat
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| 3.11.2004 - TODAY |
 Highly-paid women still relatively few and far between in Finland |
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