Men Who Hate Women and Women Who Kick Their Asses: Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy in Feminist Perspective

11. Is This What Equality Looks Like?: Working Women in the Millennium Trilogy

108 11 Is This What Equality Looks Like? Working Women in the Millennium Trilogy Diane E. Levy I n the Millennium trilogy, Stieg Larsson introduces us to a complex cast of women characters. We remember them for their intelligence , courage, resourcefulness, and strength.The women are portrayed in terms of their relationships with men, other women, the community, and the workplace.The occupational characterizations of the women and men in the novel provide critical examples of gendered arrangements and relations. Women and men work within the context of larger social and economic structures, and the characters’ actions and relationships in the novel reflect a distinctly Swedish organizational reality. In Sweden, where laws and policies reflect a more equitable gender infrastructure, how do the men and women navigate power in the workplace? How do they balance home and work? By applying a feminist lens, what can we learn about the gender arrangements in the workplace from these novels? Does Larsson assist us in seeing these in a new way? Workplaces are gendered institutions. Their policies, their everyday practices, their beliefs about success, and the interactions among workers create and reinforce our notions of the expected “place” of men and women. In performing one’s job, individuals are “doing gender ”in that the unconscious daily routines of formal organizations reflect our understandings of gendered behavior, power, and status hierarchies in the workplace. For example, if in a particular organization, the managers are men and the secretaries are women, as members of the organization act in their occupational roles, gender differences are reinforced.The “job”of the secretary is to assist the boss, the assumed Is This What Equality Looks Like? 109 job of a woman is to support a man, and these patterns of action contribute to gender identity and inequality. On reading the Millennium novels, what I first noticed about gender in the workplace was the apparent ease and normality of men and women working together at various levels in what appears to be a respectful and casual manner: almost gender blind. Just about every woman character in the novel is a working woman. With some notable exceptions—including a few instances of romantic attraction and outright sexual harassment—men and women do their jobs without strictly abiding to traditional gender norms. On the police force, on a cattle ranch, in magazine editorial offices, they go about their work paying little attention to gender hierarchies. I began to wonder if the model of work in the Millennium trilogy is a vision of the possibility of work when the social structure and cultural expectations reflect a sincere commitment to gender equity. Reading the novels with an American perspective, the ostensibly equitable gender arrangements at work in Sweden are striking. Some gains have been made in the United States to promote gender equality, including Title IX legislation and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Compared to most other modern industrial states, however, the United States lacks many social policies to support workers’ rights and gender equity, especially as they relate to work and family balance . For example, whereas most advanced nations offer paid leave to care for a newborn, the Family and Medical Leave Act enacted in the United States in 1993 guarantees workers only twelve weeks’ leave with no pay. And, this law is restricted to individuals who work in establishments with at least fifty workers—only about half the labor force. American culture is embedded with the values of individualism and self-sufficiency, leading to expectations that each worker is personally responsible for his or her own family and private life. Coupled with a strong capitalistic bias and the dominance of powerful antisocialist rhetoric, these social and cultural expectations make social welfare programs difficult to enact and a source of political and economic conflict. Not so in Sweden. As in the United States, the labor force in Sweden today is about evenly divided between men and women. In Sweden, men and women of working age (16–64 years old) are em- 110 Men Who Hate Women and Women Who Kick Their Asses ployed at almost the same rate: 75 percent for women, 79 percent for men (compared to 70 percent for US women and 78 percent for US men) (US Census Bureau, 2010). Swedish law requires equity in access to jobs and pay. In addition, there are generous guaranteed wage-based parental leave policies. In 1974, Sweden replaced “maternity...