Decoupling gender equality from gender pay audits in Swedish municipalities

Minna Salminen-Karlsson and Anna Fogelberg Eriksson
Additional contact information
Minna Salminen-Karlsson: Centre for Gender Research, Uppsala University, Sweden
Anna Fogelberg Eriksson: Department of Behavioural Sciences and Learning, Linköping University, Sweden

Economic and Industrial Democracy, 2022, vol. 43, issue 4, 1588-1609

Abstract: This article investigates processes of gender pay audits in five municipalities in Sweden in order to understand the reasons why gender pay audits in general do not level out men’s and women’s salaries in the way they are intended to. The results show how gender pay audits became a bureaucratic process to fulfil a legal requirement, and how they were decoupled from core organizational practices and salary policies. This decoupling was furthered by the realization that the result of gender pay audits would imply a need for large structural changes in pay policies, for which there were no financial means. Consequently, decoupling was found to be a major reason why gender pay audits are ineffective in coming to terms with gender pay gaps.

Keywords: Decoupling; gender equality; gender pay gap; job evaluation; municipal sector; pay audit (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0143831X211020804 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:ecoind:v:43:y:2022:i:4:p:1588-1609

DOI: 10.1177/0143831X211020804

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economic and Industrial Democracy from Department of Economic History, Uppsala University, Sweden
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().