Introduction

This book provides insights into the drive to achieve substantive gender equality in four Nordic countries: Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. It draws a diverse and complex picture of the long, uneven, and unfinished process towards that goal. These countries’ systematic use of a combination of political and legal instruments has been described as the Nordic gender equality model. The Nordic states are known for the wide range of policies and programmes that, since the middle of the 20th century, have been adopted to ensure the provision of health services, education and economic safety for all, regardless of socioeconomic background and gender. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Nordic countries were among the first in the world to enact general gender equality and anti-discrimination laws with low-threshold enforcement mechanisms as an alternative to the ordinary courts.