The gendered impacts of the COVID-19 crisis in Finland and the effectiveness of the policy responses

This paper assesses the gendered impacts of the covid-19 crisis and gender-sensitiveness of the government’s response measures in Finland, a Nordic country often seen as a forerunner of gender equality, with a focus on labour market and economic equality. Despite long-standing gender equality problems that include a persistent gender pay gap, highly gender-segregated labour market, uneven distribution of care responsibilities and high levels of violence against women, Finland tends to do well in different gender equality indices. After a recent backlash, gender equality is now high on the government’s agenda, and prime minister Sanna Marin’s government has been internationally renowned for its young female leadership, feminist policies as well as successful Covid-19 response. Similarly to many other countries, in Finland the restrictive measures of the pandemic led to rapid rise of unemployment particularly among female-dominated industries, such as services (e.g. restaurants, bars and shops) and tourism. A large proportion of employees in these industries work in low paid jobs and lack the economic security to help buffer against sudden shocks such as the Covid-19 crisis. However, unlike in many other countries, in Finland the programs and benefits introduced during the pandemic have been rather modest. Thus, it is assumed that the Finnish social security system should provide a sufficient safety net for those hit by the crisis. Moreover, despite government’s explicit commitment to gender mainstreaming and gender equality, gender perspectives were not visibly present in its Covid-19 response. In this paper, we examine 1) the gendered impacts of the Covid-19 crisis on employment, unemployment and quality of work and 2) explore to what extent government’s policy response to the hardships experienced by individuals (e.g. introduction of temporary social benefits and changes to the previous benefits) addressed and mitigated these gendered impacts. More specifically, we assess the distributional impact of Covid-19 related unemployment shock, automatic stabilizers (such as unemployment and housing benefits) and temporary Covid-19 benefits: how did the employment and distributional impacts of the crisis and the response measures affect economic gender equality in Finland? How and why did crisis intensify or change existing inequalities? For our analysis we use survey data from Statistics Finland (Labour Force Survey, a specific web survey on working conditions carried out in spring 2021) and register data on social benefits from the Social Insurance Institution Finland. We also apply SISU microsimulation model to analyse the distributional impact of Covid-19 unemployment shock.