Nearly half of Finnish employees have female bosses

Two in three municipal employees work under female supervision

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More Finnish employees have a female boss than in any other country in the European Union. Nearly 40 per cent of all Finnish employees work under female supervision.
      This information is based on a recent survey on working conditions conducted by Statistics Finland in 2008. The interviewees were asked about the qualifications of their immediate superior.
      For example Tuula Hämäläinen-Tyynilä, 62, the Head of the Espoo Environment Centre, is one of these female superiors. She has 17 subordinates: six men and 11 women.
      A recent edition of The Welfare Review published by Statistics Finland reveals that the number of female superiors is particularly high in Finnish municipalities. In fact, nearly 70 per cent of the municipalities’ employees have a woman as their immediate superior.
     
One in three men employed by municipalities works under a female supervisor like Principal Environmental Inspector Kari Kavasto, 59, who works as a subordinate to Hämäläinen-Tyynilä.
      According to the survey, female superiors are praised by their subordinates for their management style. So, too, is Hämäläinen-Tyynilä.
      ”I used to work for a consulting company, and their management style was more like that of army officers. Tuula’s style is different, encouraging. She generates high morale in the working environment”, Kavasto says admiringly.
      He believes that the boss has learnt a lot of management skills from her own children. The boss is smiling.
     
”While taking care of three children I learnt how to organise things. It also taught me how to negotiate and work with people with different logic and approach to things. Even though it is generally thought that adults always act in a rational way, decisions are affected by many different things, including feelings”, Hämäläinen-Tyynilä believes.
      According to Hämäläinen-Tyynilä, the City of Espoo Environment Centre is a typical expert organisation, in which everybody knows his or her own field and works independently. There is hardly any hierarchy and it does not matter whether the superior is a man or a woman.
      ”A good working community is a machine, the wheels of which the superior has to oil so that no part of it gets stuck”, Hämäläinen-Tyynilä argues.
     
The opening of women’s career path has been facilitated by the fact that many workplaces have changed the vertical distribution of management positions.
      ”One of the factors speeding up the change is the transfer to team work, while accordingly, the number of superiors has grown”, notes researcher Anna-Maija Lehto from Statistics Finland, who was in charge of the survey.
      The contemporary superiors no longer have so many subordinates as their counterparts for example in the 1980s did.
     
Another factor to accelerate the structural change is the significant rise in the educational level of women.
      For the past 15 years, Finnish women have acquired higher educational qualifications than men. In fact, the Finnish women have the highest education in the Nordic Countries, let alone among the EU member-states. The fact is also reflected in the working life: of all men with university degrees, one in five has a female boss.
      The proportion of women in managerial positions among the professional and managerial employees has increased from 14 per cent to 32 per cent in the course of slightly more than 20 years.
     
In general, female superiors are praised by their subordinates for support and encouragement. Female bosses are readier to give their subordinates praise for good work and keener to give them feedback than are male bosses to their subordinates.
      Furthermore, female superiors were said to encourage their subordinates to study and to offer them opportunities for development at work, while also caring about the employees’ feelings more than their male counterparts do.
     
On the other hand, the gender of the superior does not seem to make any difference where for example settling conflicts between employees and superiors are concerned.
      The survey showed further that when it comes to older workers approaching retirement age, female superiors and male bosses treat them equally.


Links:
  Statistics Finland

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