The last two decades have seen major welfare state retrenchment in Sweden. The public sector, which used to be a large and stable employer for women, was downsized. Public schools and public health and care services were privatized. Customer choice models were introduced. The rhetoric connected to privatization stressed the unique opportunities for women formerly employed by the state to start their own businesses in this sector, now open for competition and private initiatives.
In this paper we ask what the results were. We discuss the results from a feminist perspective, i.e we ask if privatization and business ownership has improved women’s situation on the labor market, or not. The paper draws together the research findings from our own empirical research (about fifteen different studies) as well as from research done by other Nordic scholars in the field.
