Gender, employment and social security in Norway

Abstract

Authors Espen Dahl and Axel West Pedersen in this article analyze how social policy and welfare reforms affect women's socio-economic position and living conditions The central question is how “gender blind” reforms influence women's labor market activity and wellbeing, in both the short—and the long-run, in a situation where important gender differences exist at the outset. In this article, the authors address the question of whether gender differences in welfare in Norway will change as the result of recent reforms in Social Insurance, family policies, and old age pensions. Dahl and Pedersen approached this question by describing the ways in which the socio-economic structures are gendered combined with a description of recent social policy reforms and an analysis of how these reforms will affect labor market activity and welfare differences between men and women.