Work is a fundamental concept in the context of economic equality. Alongside voting rights and sexual and reproductive rights, equal access to paid work in the open labour market has been a core demand of women’s movements. The demand for equal pay for work of equal value is enshrined in the ILO Constitution adopted in 1919, and in 1951 the organisation adopted Convention No 100 on equal remuneration for men and women for work of equal value. The convention clarifies that it is the content of work that should form the basis for comparison between different jobs, not whether these jobs are similar to each other (Stüber, 2024).
In addition to ratifying the ILO Convention, the Nordic countries have committed to working towards the goal of equal pay for work of equal value through the UN’s 2030 Agenda, as well as to recognising the value of reproductive work (UN, 2015). The concept of work can be divided into paid work and unpaid work, the latter performed outside the open labour market. Of particular relevance is the distinction between productive labour (usually paid), which generates added economic value, and reproductive labour (usually unpaid), which is needed to raise children and sustain a household, which provides nutrition, security, and opportunities for recovery (Beier, 2018; O'manique & Fourie, 2016; Rai et al., 2019). This is a highly gendered distinction, and one that corresponds with a structural division of labour between women and men that has been remarkably persistent (Måwe, 2019). While the focus of this report is paid work and the income it generates, there is no escaping the fact that the societal organisation of unpaid care and domestic work (characterised as reproductive work) – which is predominantly performed by women – has a number of implications for paid work.
Linked to the objective of equal pay for work of equal value are various tools for gender neutral job evaluation, which started to be developed in the 1970s and 1980s as a result of the requirements of the ILO Convention (Måwe, 2019). In the Nordic countries, with the exception of Denmark, it is recommended that employers use job evaluation to compare different jobs performed by women and men that have different content but the same requirements. The requirements of the worker should form the basis of pay setting, usually according to factors defined by the ILO (skills, effort, responsibility and working conditions), rather than the value of the work itself (Oelz et al., 2013). Like all assessments, job evaluations are based on certain assumptions and, despite a structured approach, open to subjective interpretation. A number of research studies have also shown that there is a risk of gender bias in job evaluations, with employers traditionally assigning less value to paid work performed by women (Acker, 1989; Burton, 1991; Steinberg, 1992; Bender & Pigeyre, 2016; Koskinen Sandberg, 2016; see also Salminen-Karlsson & Fogelberg Eriksson, 2025). The fact that occupations predominantly held by women are valued, and thus paid, less than occupations that require similar qualifications predominantly held by men is often referred to as value discrimination (Harriman et al., 2024).
Labour markets in the Nordic countries are characterised by two general features that are relevant to the discussion of equal pay for work of equal value in a variety of respects. First, they are highly gender segregated: most women (over 70 per cent of those employed) work in female-dominated industries and most men (over 75 per cent of those employed) work in male-dominated industries (Nordic Statistics, 2024). When this coincides with value discrimination, the result is that women as a group receive lower pay than men as a group (Harriman et al., 2024). Second, social partners have a high level of autonomy from the state and legislation with regard to pay formation: it is labour organisations and trade unions that negotiate collective agreements, and there is, for example, no legislation on minimum wages. There is some variation between the different countries in how this model works, for example in terms of the degree of state involvement, and changes have occurred over time as a result of, among other things, technological change, union membership and, not least, a convergence with the EU in several of the countries. Still, it is relevant to discuss the Nordic labour market model – or rather the Nordic group of labour market models (Dølvik, 2013; Dølvik et al., 2014; see also Stüber, 2024; Stenberg & Jochmann-Döll, 2024). Since women and men work in different occupations to such a large extent, and different but equivalent occupations may belong to different collective bargaining areas, the collective bargaining model may make it difficult to compare pay between different occupations with the same employer (see, e.g., Nousiainen et al., 2023).