Persistent Paradoxes, Pragmatic Postfeminism: How Young Women Negotiate the Contradictions of Gender Equality

Abstract

ABSTRACT Due to social change and gender detraditionalisation, young women in the Global North have been positioned as agentic subjects who can benefit from increasing freedom in education and work. However, there remains a gap between gender equality as a powerful cultural norm and the persistent inequalities that continue to shape people’s lives. Focusing on Finland, this article examines how this gap is negotiated by young women transitioning from post-compulsory education to work in two different fields: care and media. Building on the theories of postfeminism as a sensibility, the article analyses how field-specific conceptualisations of gender equality and patterns of gendered disadvantages in the two fields shape young women’s understandings of their imagined futures in the Finnish labour market. The article develops the notion of “pragmatic postfeminism” to show that young women selectively deploy elements of postfeminist sensibility as a pragmatic resource to manage the persistent gender equality paradoxes of the Finnish labour market.