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EQUALITY

IN NUMBERS: Are women equally represented in Danish leadership roles?

Women currently comprise 43 percent of Denmark's members of parliament, and 35 percent of the current government. But the proportion of representation in leading business roles is lower.

IN NUMBERS: Are women equally represented in Danish leadership roles?
2019 file photo. Denmark currently has 76 female MPs, 43 percent of the total number of seats. Photo: Søren Bidstrup/Ritzau Scanpix

Following the election in November last year, the proportion of female MPs in the Danish parliament increased to 76 or 43.4 percent. That is the closest to equal representation in the history of the parliament according to a Statistics Denmark press release on March 8th.

The 43.4 percent of female MPs is 14 percent higher than at the election in 1987, when 39-7 percent of elected lawmakers were women.

“In 2022 we got the highest proportion of women ever in parliament. We can also see the same trend in people running for election to parliament, where 38.4 percent of candidates were women, the highest proportion seen thus far,” Statistics Denmark special consultant Annemette Lindhardt Olsen said.

Some 31 percent of candidates in 1987 were women, and the proportion varied between 27 percent and 33 percent until the 2015 election.

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The proportion of female MPs elected in Denmark since 1987. Graphic: Statistics Denmark

Local governments show evidence of a similar trend, with 35.9 percent female representatives at municipalities at the last local elections in 2021, a 4 percent increase compared to 31.8 percent in 2009.

Elected boards at Regions, the authorities which administer health services regionally, reached equality at the 2021 election with 50.2 percent women elected, compared to 35.1 percent in 2009.

Ministers

Women were first allowed to run for election in Denmark in 1915. Education Minister Nina Bang became the first female minister under Social Democrat Thorvald Stauning’s government in 1924.

Apart from 1924, governments remained exclusively the domain of men until 1947, when just 4.5 percent of the cabinet were women. That proportion only increased to over 20 percent by the late 1980s, but sped up in the 1990s with 37 percent female ministers under PM Poul Nyrup Rasmussen in 1993.

The highest proportion of female ministers was 48 percent, back in 2009 in Lars Løkke Rasmussen’s first spell as prime minister. The current government has 35 percent female ministers.

As for prime ministers: It took Denmark until 2011 to elect its first female prime minister, when Helle Thorning-Schmidt defeated Rasmussen. Current PM Mette Frederiksen, a Social Democrat like Thorning-Schmidt, is Denmark’s second female government leader and has won two elections.

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The proportion of female directors at Danish companies since 2014. Graphic: Statistics Denmark

Company boards

Boardrooms at Danish companies continue to be relatively male-dominated. In 2021, some 81 percent of registered board members at Danish businesses were men. The percentage of men and women on Danish boards remained stable between 2014 and 2021.

“If we exclusively look at production companies, the proportion of women in boardrooms is highest at companies with over 250 employees – especially highly technological companies, where the proportion of women was 28 percent in 2021,” Statistics Denmark special consultant Kalle Emil Holst Hansen said.

Small and medium sized businesses have the lowest equality between men and women in boardrooms, he also said.

The proportion of female directors has increased slightly since 2014 but remains at a modest 16 percent, according to the data.

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EQUALITY

IN NUMBERS: How gender equal is Denmark really?

For International Women's Day, we decided to break down the statistics over gender equality in Denmark.

IN NUMBERS: How gender equal is Denmark really?

On the face of it, Denmark is one of the most gender-equal countries in the world, ranking third in the European Institute for Gender Equality’s 2023 ranking, just behind Sweden and The Netherlands.

Denmark was ahead of The Netherlands in women’s equality in the workplace and in income equality. The country also did well when it comes to women in positions of power. It was one of only five EU countries with a female prime minister, one of five where over 40 percent of MPs are women, and has the 10th highest proportion of female MEPs in the EU. 

The European Institute for Gender Equality’s 2023 gender equality ranking.

It is generally easier for women Denmark to return to the workforce after having a child, as the generous parental leave system — with each parent granted 24 weeks each of leave following the birth of a child — encourages men to be more involved, by earmarking 11 weeks of leave for each parent.

The country has heavily subsidised daycare which is available from the time a child is 26 months old. This costs about 3,800 kroner a month in a big city like Copenhagen. 

Women also perform very well in education, overtaking men in the number studying a long course at university in 2017, since when their lead has steadily increased with 249,610 women completing a “long higher education” compared with 221,243 men. About 376,640 women have completed some form of higher education, well above the 270,003 men who had a degree. 

Where Denmark falls behind

But this hides some less flattering statistics.

Even though women are more likely to be educated to a higher level than men, this is not reflected in their earnings. The most recent comparison of the gender pay gap in different EU countries found that women in Denmark earned 13.9 percent less than men. 

That is a a bigger pay gap than the EU average of 12.7 percent, and the 9th worst score, below countries like Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania and Italy, even if was better than Norway (14.4 percent) and Germany (17.7 percent). This also leads to a so-called ‘pensions’ gap of 17 percent, with men’s pensions far outweighing women’s. 

The pay gap in Denmark is often put down to women being overrepresented in less well-paying caring professions such as nursing or teaching, but a study by Copenhagen Business School in 2022 found that women are also paid on average 7 percent less than men for doing the exact same job.

While this may be disappointing, the study found the wage gap for the same job was lower in Denmark than in any other country in the EU apart from France, with women in Sweden and Norway suffering wage discounts of 8 percent and 9 percent respectively.  

Women are also heavily underrepresented at the leadership level in Danish businesses, with women only making up 19 percent of board members of Danish companies and only 16 percent of directors.

This compares very poorly to neighbouring Norway, where gender quota laws have led to women taking up 41 percent of board seats.

Parental leave 

In 2021, women still took the largest share of parental leave by far, taking 278 days compared to just 36 for men. Since new rules came in in 2022, the number of fathers taking parental leave has increased by 40 percent, but the number of days men spend at home changing nappies still remains far below the time that new mothers put in. 

Violence 

One area where Denmark’s performance is deteriorating rather than improving is violence against women. Since 2015, there has been a sharp increase in the number of reports of violence against women, with 486 women per 100,000 making such a report in 2021, up from just 220 per 100,000 in 2015. 

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