Sweden—purported feminist paradise—is consistently ranked as one of the most gender-equal countries in the world.

Half of its government ministers are women (compared to just 26% of United States Congress members), they have a dedicated Gender Equality Agency, and while they have a wage gap it is inches away from being eliminated: in Sweden, women earn 95.6% of what men do. What’s more is that all this information is freely available on sweden.se, the official source for facts and figures about Sweden run by The Swedish Institute, a public agency. Gender equity is an essential part of Sweden’s self-image and national identity (Neuman). 

The home kitchen is a microcosm of this identity. Men and women in Sweden split domestic duties evenly; in fact, home economics has been a mandatory part of school education for students of all genders since 1962 (Neuman). It is also the only country in the world where men are steadily taking on more feeding work responsibilities (Neuman).

So what of the restaurant kitchen? Is it too a nexus of gender equity, where women can easily succeed? That is the central question of this section. As a dual American-Swedish citizen, this thought exercise was a particularly intriguing one for me.

I do, though, admit that my data here is limited. With a language barrier—and with this field still in its relative infancy—there is a limit to what I am able to collect on the subject of women leadership in Swedish restaurants. I have not conducted any interviews, as I have for the rest of Asking For it. Instead, I have relied on a handful of studies, information from The Swedish Institute and books and articles published here in the United States. Together, they have allowed me to investigate whether or not the main barriers I have identified—babies, bodies and buzz—are preventing women from ascending to top roles in Swedish restaurants.

The answer? Yes and no. While Sweden’s tremendous emphasis on gender equity has made work better for women across professions, its restaurant industry was born from the same deeply masculinized place as ours: nineteenth-century France. This man-dominated legacy is still present in kitchens and dining rooms across the Global North. As a result, Sweden’s restaurant industry has lowered some of the barriers but hasn’t quite succeeded in eliminating them completely. 

It is inarguably easier to be a parent in Sweden.

Firstly, they have one of the most generous paid family leave policies in the world: 

“Parents in Sweden are entitled to 480 days of paid parental leave when a child is born or adopted. Each parent – should they be two – is entitled to 240 of those days. If the child is born in 2016 or later, each parent has 90 days reserved exclusively for him/her. Should he/she decide not to take these, they can’t be transferred to the partner. A single parent is entitled to a full 480 days.” - Work-Life Balance

480 days = 16 months. There is also no rush to take this leave; my cousin, for example, traded off taking chunks of parental leave with her partner (a man) from when her oldest child was born until the youngest turned eight. His leave was not unusual: 85% of fathers in Sweden take paternity leave (Bennhold), in part because a portion of parental leave is set aside exclusively for them. Sweden has made a concerted effort to include fathers in child care, replacing “maternity leave” with “parental leave” in legislative language in 1974 (Work-Life Balance).

Once a child reaches pre-school age, families don’t need to fret about financing child care. Legally, the maximum monthly cost for one child’s care in Sweden is $160—not meant to exceed more than 3% of the family’s net income—and the cost decreases with each successive child (Collins). 

Though there is a robust legislative and cultural framework in place to support all parents, it doesn’t always seem to translate to restaurants. The data here is admittedly thin: Sweden got being a working parent right, so there are relatively fewer experts studying it. Still, in their expert examination of how gourmet restaurants construct masculine ideologies, the four elite men head chefs Brita Hermelin interviewed all cited family responsibilities as one of the top reasons women exit the hospitality workforce (Hermelin). One interviewee explained that a woman’s natural place is at home: “[Women] are good at co-parenting and they are less eager for prestige,” he said. Another explained that the sheer time commitment restaurants require preclude women from succeeding. “We work around 450 hours a month,” one explained, revealing that commitment is measured as working long hours. He went on: “It is an incredible amount of work and it kills relationships…perhaps girls are wiser, more thoughtful” to leave restaurant work. His implication is that mothers—or women with family responsibilities—are choosing to leave the workforce which, as the Babies section of this project has hopefully demonstrated, is untrue. Rather, his comment implies that while Sweden is as a country supremely supportive of parents, restaurants can still be tough places for mothers. 

Restaurants also remain inhospitable places for women’s bodies.

Unfortunately, stereotypes about physical strength persist. As one of Hermelin’s interviewees explained:

“Being a chef is tough. The profession is tough physically. It’s difficult as a woman to fight your way there.”

Another put it more bluntly, stating that in his experience women are simply too weak to work at an elite level: “waitresses faint” when his restaurant gets busy after receiving a wave of media attention. The former subject’s use of “fight” implies that restaurants are not spaces where women are inherently welcome—it will be a challenge for them to succeed. One of these challenges is physical and verbal abuse, which remains a problem in Scandinavian restaurants (Mathisen). In a study of 207 employees across 70 Norwegian restaurants, researchers found that aggression and bullying are considered “a natural and even necessary part of the work environment” (Mathisen). 

One of the industry’s biggest challenges is sexual harassment, which remains a problem across the Scandinavian hospitality industry. A study by the Swedish Environment Authority found that 19% of hospitality workers they surveyed had experienced workplace harassment (Report on Sexual Harassment). As of 2016 that figure is 17% in Norway, 25% in Denmark and 41% in Iceland (Report on Sexual Harassment). Finland employed a slightly different metric, which showed that 38% of workers in the private service sector had dealt with harassment (Report on Sexual Harassment). Still, these rates are consistently significantly lower than those in the United States where, by contrast, 90% of women restaurant being workers report being sexually harassed at work (Albors-Garrigos). 

Interestingly, all of the Scandinavian studies mentioned in a 2016 report on sexual harassment include men and women—an approach that more studies on restaurant harassment should consider. It helps to illuminate workplace harassment as a universal problem, rather than a “women’s issue.” Indeed, this shared framework is a hallmark of Scandinavia’s approach to this issue. In this report, the societal costs of sexual harassment are listed first: 

While this is only one report, prioritizing the collective consequences of sexual harassment stands in stark contrast to the rhetoric of individualism that characterizes it here. Perhaps this approach is part of what breeds lower reported rates of harassment in Scandinavian restaurants: it is everyone’s problem, not just the victims’. 

As in the United Sates, Sweden’s food media and awards have historically excluded women.

Elite cooking has been similarly gendered masculine (Hermelin). In their study of Stockholm’s fine dining restaurants, Hermelin and her colleagues identified that food journalists described men chefs as passionate, innovative, groundbreaking artists. They found cooking at an elite level to be characterized by technical brilliance and precision. As Harris and Giuffre found in Taking the Heat, professional, masculine cooking is a vehicle through which a chef can show off in contrast to feminine cooking, which is about nourishing others. 

Awards more plainly favor men chefs. As of 2017, no woman chef had ever won Gulddraken, a prestigious yearly honor bestowed upon the best gourmet luxury restaurant in Sweden by the newspaper Dagens Nyheter (Hermelin). While it might seem an exaggeration to dwell on a single award, it plays an essential part in blockading women from leadership positions. Dagens Nyheter is amongst the most widely read daily newspapers in Sweden, with more than 350,000 subscribers (Moritz). Winning the award typically leads to a flood of publicity and, crucially, an exponential uptick in the number of guests visiting the winning restaurant. Indeed, these awards have very real benefits and the power to kickstart careers. Excluding women from awards, and from media coverage, prevents them from gaining access to the capital—professional and financial—they need to open their own restaurants. As Hermelin and her colleagues put it: “None of the interviewees (restaurateurs, chefs or journalists) could give an example of a woman who was a prestigious gourmet restaurateur in Stockholm.”