Likvärdig tillgång till stöd? : En kvalitativ studie om arbetsförmedlares utmaningar i att ge samma stöd och insatser till arbetssökande män och kvinnor

Sammanfattning: The main purpose of this study is to examine why the process out to the Swedish labour market is unequal between men and women through the Swedish Public Employment Service. It has appeared through a pilot study that job-seeking men get more support in their efforts to break their unemployment to a greater extent than job-seeking women. This opposes the Swedish Public Employment Service’s aspirations of an equal labour market between men and women which can be identified as a discrepancy. This discrepancy is the starting point of this study, which aims to investigate experiences from employment officers about why this is the case. Previous studies have given us an insight in potential explanations, but not directly through Swedish employment officers who work in close contact with the job-seekers. Therefore the questions that have been raised are firstly about what problems employment officers encounter in their efforts to give equal support to men and women and secondly if there are any overall differences between job-seeking men and women and how we can understand them. The theoretical framework for this study consists of the theory of Glass Ceiling and Lipsky's theory of Street-level Bureaucrats.   In order to study the experiences about inequality in the process of job-seekers to the labour market, the method consists of semi-structured interviews with eight employment officers. The results from the interviews showed that employment officers encounter different conditions that do limit their influence in their pursuit of equality between men and women in their job-seeking. Furthermore, employment officers believe that women encounter certain obstacles and difficulties, which does not restrict men in the same way.