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Regional Gender Inequality in the Norwegian Culture of Equality

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Abstract

This research project has its origin in statistical findings indicating that there has been a long-standing regional variation in the attainment of gender equality in Norway whereby the southern region has been identified as the least gender-equal. This is likely to be caused by an interaction of economic, political and cultural structures. Nevertheless, the understanding of this phenomenon remains incomplete since the cultural dimension too often ends up as a residual category or a dependent variable. The project seeks to explore the cultural dimension by asking how persons themselves understand and justify gender inequalities and everyday life choices. By drawing on ‘repertoires of justification’, as developed by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, the present analysis provides insight into how culturally embedded values are mobilised when parents discuss labour and domestic responsibility.

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Notes

  1. Even if in many Western European countries a modified male breadwinner model—that is, a one-and-a-halfearner model—has become the norm [36].

  2. For differences between the Scandinavian dual breadwinner societies, see Ellingsæter [13].

  3. Even if women are still underrepresented in various power elites, the labour market is still gendered and many female workers struggle to combine work, family and leisure.

  4. See Statistics Norway on ‘Gender equality index for Norwegian municipalities 2010’: http://www.ssb.no/english/subjects/00/02/10/likekom_en/.

  5. In such a cultural sociological approach culture must itself be regarded as an independent variable [2].

  6. See Godechot [22] for a review.

  7. These approaches do not primarily look for hidden strategies of power, although they do not exclude the existence of such. Instead, they concentrate on situations where actors criticise other persons’ arguments or legitimate their own in order to map out which ‘orders of worth’ are mobilised in different situations and how situations are ‘stabilised’. Comparative studies show that such practices of appreciation, worth and critique have patterns that follow national cultural repertoires of evaluation [35: 8–9].

  8. Thévenot et al. [52] also suggest a possible new order of green worth, and Boltanski and Chiapello [5] (orig. 1999) suggest a possible project order of worth. We have not found them in our data, thus they are not included in the summary.

  9. A: Answer. Q: Question.

  10. In addition, there are also some informants who used the domestic repertoire of justifications when discussing work, but when the conversations explicitly turned to division of labour and gender equality, the civic repertoire seemed to displace the domestic.

  11. In recent years the paternal quota has been the subject of heated public debate; see Ellingsæter [15] for a discussion.

  12. Sometimes the industrial and civic repertoires were also supported by the domestic repertoire of evaluation in this context.

  13. Or maybe a ‘different political framing of care’ is needed [9].

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Acknowledgments

This research has been funded by the Competence and Development Fund of Southern Norway and Agder Research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology and Social Work, University of Agder, Postboks 422, 4604, Kristiansand, Norway

    Ove Skarpenes

  2. Gimlemoen 25 H, Kristiansand, Norway

    Ove Skarpenes

  3. Agder Research/University of Agder, Gimlemoen 19, 4630, Kristiansand S., Norway

    Ann Christin E. Nilsen

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Correspondence to Ove Skarpenes.

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Skarpenes, O., Nilsen, A.C.E. Regional Gender Inequality in the Norwegian Culture of Equality. Gend. Issues 32, 39–56 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12147-014-9131-0

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