Men in almost all Finnish political parties have told researchers that because of their gender, they are at a disadvantage in the selection of candidates for the 2019 parliamentary elections.
Views on the role of gender in the new designation process occurred in a broader study, which made the researchers from the University of Helsinki, University of Tampere, University of Turku and Åbo Akademi University.
Researchers Josefina Sipinen and Vesa Koskimaa theorizes that the finding is related to the fact that male candidates are aware that the nomination of female candidates is a priority in parties where voters are known to be dominated by women.
In the Green Party in particular, male parties clearly experienced more often than women that their gender adversely affected their position in the nomination process. In the Social Democratic Party and the Left Alliance, about a third of men felt that their gender was at least to some extent a disadvantage.
However, there were no gender variation in national coalition party. Just under one-fifth of both men and women felt that their position in the nomination process had been negatively affected by gender.
The Swedish People’s Party was the only political party where male members said their gender was not an obstacle in their candidacy.
In the 2019 parliamentary elections, 42 percent of the candidates were women and 58 percent were men. The proportion of women was slightly higher than in the previous two parliamentary elections in 2015 and 2011.
Source: The Nordic Page