Women soon to outnumber men at work
More women encroaching on predominantly male jobs - such as surgery
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By Pauliina Pulkkinen
Last weekend, surgeon Ulla Keränen, 51, attended a conference of the European Society of Coloproctology in Prague. Also attending the event were the top experts in the field in all of Europe.
“The men were in the majority, but the younger the age groups, the more women they had”, Keränen recalls.
The situation is similar at her own place of work - Hyvinkää Hospital. Most of the older specialists are men, but women form a clear majority of young hospital physicians going into a specialty.
Keränen heads a unit in which the number of male and female surgeons is about equal.
“During the 25 years I have been at work, there has been a significant change here. When I began to specialise in surgery, I was one of the only women in the group. Now most of those taking on a specialty are women”, Keränen says.
The medical profession has traditionally been dominated by men; women have gradually risen from a minority position to one where the genders are in balance, and beyond.
At present, 52 per cent of doctors who work in Finland are women.
The trend in the medical profession is mirrored to a great extent in the rest of society. The number of women at work is set to exceed that of men in the coming days.
This has never happened before, except for the war years, when men were at the front and the women worked on the home front.
At all other times, there have been more men at work than women.
The reason for the situation, which is quite rare at the international level, is the recession. The present slump hit traditional male professions, such as construction and the metal industry. Unemployment grew among men, but not among women.
The recession is not the only factor that has favoured women at work. In Finland women have actually always worked alongside men. In an agricultural society, men and women had different tasks, but both worked hard, and side by side.
Rapid urbanisation brought with it an increase in demand for services. it was natural that women, who had been accustomed to working at their home farms, started serving others in return for wages. Poverty also sent women to work.
One person’s wages were not enough to sustain a family. No housewife culture ever really took hold in Finland.
Employment among men and women has moved on the same, moderately tempestuous journey. Slumps and recessions have affected employment of both genders.
However, women’s employment has been clearly rising ever since the late 1960s to the recession of the 1990s. A surge took place in the mid-1970s and in the late 1980s. In the early 1970s the law on child day care was passed, which was expanded in the late 1980s at the same time as support for home care.
“Women’s employment in the Nordic Countries grows if there are care services available for children and the elderly. Day care legislation has been a significant factor in increasing employment for women”, says Anneli Anttonen, Professor of Social Policy at the University of Tampere.
Caring for children and the elderly remains a matter for women to a great extent, even if it is often done outside the home. In addition to working at traditional women’s jobs, Finnish women have been in the vanguard, internationally, in moving into men’s fields.
Ulla Keränen is a good example of this.
When she started her medical studies in the late 1970s, men slightly outnumbered women among her fellow students. When she went into surgery, she was one of the few women to do so. At her job at the time at the Riihimäki Regional Hospital, Keränen was the first surgeon, and the first doctor to be pregnant.
“The setup, hat a woman was a surgeon, and that she operated on patients while pregnant, was upsetting in the hospital and in society as a whole. Patients thought I was a doctor’s wife, who would see them for fun along with her husband”, Keränen recalls.
It was not always easy with her male colleagues.
“The things that I had to hear was from the former world - surgery of a bygone day. It was not intended as an insult. some men simply found it hard to understand that a woman could work as a surgeon”, Keränen says.
As she sees it, the great change did not take place in working life until the present decade. “Suddenly there simply were enough women. The change happened on its own. Nowadays it is clear as day that men and women work as surgeons, and that the women are occasionally on maternity leave and the men take paternity leave. We all have family lives”, Keränen says.
Everyone does, indeed have a family life, but the recession of the 1990s showed that for women it was either a trap, or a salvation. When the labour market collapsed, women went home to care for children and old people. Some went voluntarily, while others were compelled.
This has not yet happened in the current downturn. “Women have not yet had to go back home. students have been the buffer. We had about 300,000 students who work. Now we have about 50,000 fewer”, says Anna-Maija Lehto of Statistics Finland.
Women may have to be more flexible again if the slump is extended. The service sector, which employs many women, will suffer from the recession even when things get better. When unemployment among men starts to burden the economies of families, families will not be able to afford to spend as much money on services as they used to.
Then some of the women might end up unemployed, and go home to do unpaid caring work.
Before that, the number of women at work will still grow in proportion to men. it is very likely that this autumn, there will be more women at work than men.
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 4.10.2009
PAULIINA PULKKINEN / Helsingin Sanomat
pauliina.pulkkinen@hs.fi
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| 6.10.2009 - THIS WEEK |
 Women soon to outnumber men at work |
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