Equal rights and discrimination law in Scandinavia

Employment discrimination law in Scandinavia1 is a relatively recent development–occurring within the past thirty years. As will be discussed further below, the first proposals to legislate in this area met with some initial resistance, largely because such legislation was considered incompatible with the Scandinavian labour law tradition of self-regulation.Employment discrimination legislation was ultimately adopted despite this resistance primarily because of influences from international law and the women’s movement in Scandinavia. The Scandinavian countries acceded to a number of international agreements banning sex and race discrimination in the 1960s and 70s, such as ILO Conventions 1003 and 111 and the UN Conventions on Race Discrimination and Elimination of All Forms Discrimination against Women.
Accession to these international agreements triggered debates about the extent to which legislation was necessary to live up to the obligations they imposed. The circumstances leading up to the emergence of feminist movements in Scandinavia in the 1970s provided an additional political basis of support for adoption of equal rights legislation despite friction with the Scandinavian labour law model.
The first legislation addressing discrimination in the Scandinavian labour market concerned sex discrimination and appeared in the 1970s. Other kinds of discrimination did not receive any special legislative attention until the 1990s. Section 2 of this article describes the development of laws addressing employment discrimination on the basis of sex. Section 3 describes the development of laws intended to address employment discrimination based on other factors.