From the 1980s onwards, three Nordic countries (Norway, Finland and Iceland) have adopted legal gender quotas for public commissions and boards. The Finnish quotas (from 1995 onwards), decreeing a balance of at least 40 percent of women and men in the membership of all public preparatory bodies as well as the executive branch of local government, have been claimed to be the strongest of the kind. The paper investigates the implementation of such gender quotas in Finland, by targeting crucial policy-making committees over time, 2000-2015, and identifying the factors which aid or hinder successful implementation of second level quotas by various ministries. The paper builds on earlier research and the author’s collection of extensive quantitative and qualitative data on public preparatory bodies in Finland between 2000 and the present.
