Moderates add feminist touch to policy platform

The Moderate Party is making an election year play to increase its appeal to feminist voters, promising to take on gender-based pay disparities and ranking schools according to gender equity, among other proposals.

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“Gendered power structures still exist despite efforts which have been made to increase equality between the sexes,” the Moderates write in the gender equity platform embraced by the party’s governing board, the Svenska Dagbladet (SvD) reports.

“We politicians must do more to improve gender equity. Both as lawmakers and as employers in the public sector.”

“Subjective” differences in pay between men and women will be dealt with, the Moderates assert.

Salary surveys will be carried out every other year at private employers and every year at public sector workplaces, and organizations that don’t follow the rules will be punished.

The parental leave gender-equity bonus, which provides tax-breaks to couples who divide their parental leave days equally between the sexes, will be revised, but the party has refrained from earmarking a certain number of parental leave months for fathers, who currently take much less parental leave than mothers.

Nor are the Moderates willing to go so far as to demand legislation on gender issues, except when it comes to the number of women on corporate boards, where the party would like to see a doubling by 2014.

If female board representation doesn’t increase by then, the Moderates are prepared to pass a law which would introdue a quota for the inclusion of women on company boards.

In addition, the Moderate Party calls for a gender equity certification programme for Swedish schools to be administered by the National Agency for Education (Skolverket).