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EQUALITY, WOMEN AND POWER
idea that having equal opportunities is very important has grown in our society as a strong and important value, the acceptance that men and women should have equal rights.” But “culturally, it is much more complicated. Women are supposed to have equal opportunities and good jobs. However, especially when you are a mother, you are expected to fulfill your family obligations.” Women, if they worked, “were expected to earn lower salaries in comparison to their husbands. And if women wanted to work, they usually had to ask for permission from their husbands. For a long time, women worked until they married and then their contracts ended. So we´ve come a long way. But, then values changed in the sense that it in the 1960s and 1970s it became accepted that you should have choices and autonomy.” Why does she think a quota law wasn’t passed in her country? “I think the rejection of the quota law has to do with a cultural tendency that exists in some European countries to reject collective solutions, because culturally these countries are more inclined to the idea that you are not part of a group but you are an individual. That belief has advantages but also disadvantages because it covers up the existence of persistent patterns of power in societies. When problems are defined as individual, they are not tackled with collective solutions. This individualistic tendency of societies feeds the idea that collective solutions are an inadequate thing from the past, a thing from the sixties or the seventies that is not fashionable anymore. Of course you have to try as an individual. But it should be recognized that some groups are being marginalized.” How was her experience as a visible female politician in the media? “When I became Member of Parliament, in a lot of media in-