The Nordic Gender Pay Gap Balancing Act

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine the literature surrounding a perplexing phenomenon in the Nordic countries. The gender pay gap has been mostly stagnant since the 1970s and 1980s in the Nordic countries despite many family-friendly labor market policies such as mandated parental leave benefits and subsidized childcare. I find that the social structures that cause many gender labor market outcome differences are inadvertently reinforced by these policies. The overall effect is an increase in female labor participation but at the cost of widening pressures on the gender pay gap.