ABSTRACT
This chapter explores some of the main outcomes from the standpoint of women's employment, its characteristics, and the prevailing gender contract. Finland is one of the few European countries where full-time paid employment constitutes the norm for women as well as for men. The gender contract in Finland, as well as in other Nordic countries, is structured around the very fact that women constitute the majority of public sector full-time paid employment. The chapter addresses the questions of what will happen to women's work and to typical full-time public sector employment. It describes the restructuring of welfare services from the state model into various mixed-economy models, where the purchaser of the services not the same as the service provider. The chapter focuses on these changes by looking at one particular case where the change-over of welfare state services has gone furthest, that is in Finnish social welfare services in the 1990s.
