Gender discrimination in Swedish family courts: A quantitative vignette study

Abstract

Background Gender discrimination of women is often emphasized in work contexts, whereas less focus is on how men are discriminated against in social relationships. Gender discrimination in decisions of family relations, is essential to study as the contact between parent and child is commonly viewed as the most important relationship in people’s life, as well as being the most important aspect of our life. Following separations, decisions on custody disputes are made by social workers. The purpose of this paper is to study gender discrimination in such decisions. Method Participants were instructed to give a recommendation of shared parenting based on a custody case vinjett, where we manipulate the gender of the risk parent. Results The participants’ recommendation of living was mainly dependent on the risk parent’s gender, where the mother was considerably more likely to receive shared custody than the father. Conclusions Professional social workers show selective gender discrimination against fathers in terms of living recommendations.