Gender equality in Norway, International Women’s Day 2014

Norway’s Statistisk sentralbyrå, or Statistics Norway in English, has a website full of fascinating numbers about life in Norway. On International Women’s Day, we find the infographic below, reporting some key statistics about gender equality in Norway, anno 2014.

• 25% of men and 31.6% of women have some post-secondary education.
• 82,9% of men and 76.8% of women have paid work.
• 13.7% of men and 34.5% of women work parttime.
• Men earn on average 470,500 Norwegian crowns per year ($78,677, €56,724) while women earn 313,000 ($52,340, €37,736).
• 70.7% of the employees in the public sector are women while only 36.5% of employees in the private sector are women.
• 35.2% of leadership positions are filled by women.
• 38.2% of those elected to regional political office are women.

The last row in the infographic shows one particularly interesting statistic, namely that 68.1% of men take out their full allocation of parental leave. Without going into too many details, the Norwegian system for staying home with a new infant awards about 52 weeks of paid leave to a couple to divide as they see fit. However, 10 of these weeks cannot be transferred to the mother, but instead must be used by the father or lost.

Gender equality has come far in Norway, but as you can see here, there’s still room for improvement.