Swedish Feminsim: A Look Into An Even And Just Society

 Swedish Feminism

Sweden has emerged as an exemplary nation for practicing Feminism. We can learn from its special ways of implementing principles based of equality of gender. This Scandinavian country has shown that knowledge and experience of both men and women can be used to bring positive changes in all aspects of society.

Sweden is ranked 7^th worldwide for having the most women in parliament, and the overall share of women in political leadership positions were more or equal to men . World Economic Forum, an international organization, ranks every year, more than 140 countries based on the gap between women and men according to indicators of health, education, economy and politics; and since 2006, Sweden has never ranked lower than the fourth position. The government, organized labour, and other institution, have distributed the burden of parenting between men and women. 

In linguistic terms, hen is a gender-neutral personal pronoun in Swedish intended as an alternative to the gender-specific hon ("she") and han ("he"). It can be used when the gender of a person is not known or when it is not desirable to specify them as either a "she" or "he". By late 2012, hen began to be used in official documents at some government agencies. In 1974, Sweden was the first country in the world to replace gender-specific "maternity leave" with "parental leave". By 2014, male counterparts were taking 25 per cent of the total number of  days available to couples having new births. As of 1 January 2016, there are three ‘daddy months’ with 90 days of paid leave reserved for new fathers. The relatively high number of fathers on ‘daddy leave’ has caused foreign journalists to wonder why there are so many male nannies in Sweden. Others call them ‘latte dads’.

Special mention of the documentary Kids Being Raised Without Gender, by VICE

VICE host Amelia Abraham visited Sweden, to find out what it's like to grow up without the gender binary, in this  forward-thinking country when it comes to questioning gender. Amelia spent time with one of these gender non-conforming families in Orebro. Here she asks, mapa Del LaGrace Volcano, who was born intersex (both male and female) and was raised as female from birth as why she is called a made up name of mum and dad, "mapa" . Her children, five-year-old Mika and three-year-old Nico, and their grandma, Margareta explains Amelia. She visits Mika and Nico's gender aware kindergarten to find out what the teachers and the other kids make out of Mika's gender expression. She also meets Lotta Rajalin, the founder of Sweden's gender-neutral kindergartens, to learn how they go about scrapping gender norms from education. Amelia could understand that the differences of  inculcation in superheroes, colours, smell, and  as well as physical shapes were different in Orebro, and psychiatrist Dr Eberhard, who is supportive of Sweden's attitude to gender in kindergartens comes to her aid in understanding this new-found knowledge. And hereby the video on YouTube gives a critical statement by the five-year-old Mika, who has long pink dyed hair, “ Last summer, lots of kids came up to me and said, "Are you a boy or girl"?" I answered that I was neither, then I said I was both. And later as the video ends, Del LaGrace writes a letter to the parents of Mika's new school to make their children be more tolerant to Mika's approach to dressing and behaviour, and also to any kind of gender related issues as a whole.

The Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson received considerable attention when he visited Stockholm, Sweden's capital recently. He was told to “crawl back under a rock” by Sweden’s Foreign Minister and engaged in a heated discussion about the paradox of gender equality in progressive societies Peterson said: “Look, one of the things you want to ask yourself is that what is the purpose of setting up a society that offers maximal equality of opportunity and one of the answers is that you maximise choice. And if you maximise choice then you also maximise the differences in choice between people”.