Johan Berglund

Women and men are supposedly born equal in our society, and as citizens both sexes are assumed to have the same rights and opportunities. “In laws, agreements and regulations the Swedish society has in a high degree created the conditions for an equal society.” (Grinups, 1992, p. 3). Still, empirically this is hardly the case. Women are still subordinated, and they are systematically kept outside of important positions in the public life. Although many of the formal and visible barriers to entry are gone several informal and invisible mechanisms serve the same function: that of excluding women from public arenas. There is a widely spread gender blindness in our society, which constantly, and often silently, transforms potential gender issues into non-issues. As a consequence, the ‘logic’ reproducing the inequalities are usually harder to detect. Furthermore, given that men and women as citizens are officially equal, the empirical patterns that suggest otherwise can always be explained by a reality that is lagging behind (Hirdman, 1987), thereby defining the problem as a historical residue, and not a contemporary problem.