According to an Yle report, there are only 33 Finnish municipalities where both the board chair and the council chair are female. Meanwhile, there are 120 municipalities where both chairs are male.
This is despite the fact that in the last municipal elections in 2017, more women were elected into municipal councils than ever before. Women currently make up 39 percent of all councillors.
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The information is based on an Yle survey sent to 293 municipalities. Yle received a response from 288 municipalities, and the information for five municipalities was taken from the municipalities' websites.
Altogether there are 309 municipalities in Finland, including 16 in the autonomous Åland Islands, which are mostly small.
We'll be covering the issues leading up to the elections on 13 June in our All Points North podcast. You can hear the latest episode n this embedded player, via Yle Areena, on Spotify or via your favoured podcast provider.
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According to Yle's report, there is a clear gender division in municipal politics in certain parts of Finland: in large cities, municipal leadership tends to be more female-dominated, while in small municipalities most of the leading decision-makers are men.
The larger the municipality, the more women councillors and chairs there are. In cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants, up to two-thirds of chairs are women. In municipalities with less than 10,000 inhabitants, the leadership is male-dominated.
Threat of harassment may discourage women from running
Marianne Pekola-Sjöblom, Head of Research at the Association of Finnish Local and Regional Authorities, says the gender division can be explained through two things: the number of women who run for office and political power relations.
Last autumn, the Association of Finnish Local and Regional Authorities investigated the reasons that affect people's willingness to run for office in municipal elections.
The desire to run for office is reduced due to personal reasons, said Pekola-Sjöblom. Many of those with families feel they do not have enough time for politics when their lives are already filled with family life, work and hobbies. The threshold for entering politics may be high for women, who often bear the main responsibility of childcare.
Another reason that women might not want to go into municipal politics might be fear of sexual harassment, said Pekola-Sjöblom.
"Harassment and intimidation have been a growing phenomenon in recent years. It reduces women’s enthusiasm to go into politics."
Municipal researcher Jenni Airaksinen is concerned that the threat of harassment will erode democracy if it puts people off from even running for office.
"Politicians realise that the more prominent their role is, the more they are harassed. It should not be a case where only those with particularly thick skin end up making decisions on behalf of everyone else," Airaksinen said.
The next local elections have been postponed from April to mid-June.