According to Yle’s report, there are only 33 municipalities in Finland where both the chairman of the board and the chairman of the council are women. At the same time, there are 120 municipalities where both presidents are men.
This is despite the fact that in the last municipal elections in 2017, more women were elected to municipal councils than ever before. Women currently make up 39% of all council members.
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The data are based on Yle’s questionnaire sent to 293 municipalities. Yle received responses from 288 municipalities, and information on five municipalities was taken from the municipalities’ websites.
There are a total of 309 municipalities in Finland, 16 of which are in the autonomous region of Åland, which are mostly small.
According to Yle’s report, there is a clear gender distribution in municipal policy in certain parts of Finland: in large cities, municipal leadership is usually more dominated by women, while in small municipalities most of the leading decision-makers are men.
The larger the municipality, the more female counselors and chairpersons there are. In cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants, up to two-thirds of chairs are women. In municipalities with less than 10,000 inhabitants, leadership is dominated by man.
The threat of harassment can prevent women from running
Marianne Pekola-SjöblomThe research manager of the Association of Finnish Local and Regional Authorities says that the gender distribution can be explained in two ways: by the number of women applying for positions and by political power relations.
Last autumn, the Finnish Association of Local Authorities investigated the reasons that affect people’s willingness to run in municipal elections.
The desire to apply for a job decreases for personal reasons, Pekola-Sjöblom said. Many families suffer from feeling that they do not have enough time for politics when their lives are already full of family life, work and hobbies. The threshold for political income may be high for women, who often have the main responsibility for childcare.
Another reason why women may not want to go into municipal politics may be fear of sexual harassment, Pekola-Sjöblom said.
"Harassment and intimidation have been a growing phenomenon in recent years. It reduces women’s enthusiasm to go into politics."
Municipal researcher Jenni Airaksinen is concerned that the threat of harassment undermines democracy if it displaces people even from office.
"Politicians understand that the more important their role is, the more they are harassed. There should be no case where only those with particularly thick skin end up making decisions for everyone else," Airaksinen said.
The next local elections have been postponed from April to mid-June.
Source: The Nordic Page