When Divorce Is an Opportunity

STOCKHOLM—Sweden has the reputation of being one of the best countries in the world for gender equality. The women’s employment rate in Sweden is the highest in the European Union, and is nearly equal to the men’s employment rate. Nearly 90 percent of Swedish fathers take paternity leave—it is not unusual to see men pushing baby carriages alone in the city.

This can be disconcerting for the hundreds of thousands of immigrants who have arrived in Sweden in recent years—163,000 new immigrants arrived in the country of 9 million in 2016 alone. Although Sweden has lately its open-door migration policy, the country for a long time admitted the asylum-seekers per capita in Europe. Many of these refugees and other immigrants to Sweden come from countries like Somalia and Iraq, where gender roles are more uneven: Men tend to work and women tend to raise families. In Sweden, though, women—even immigrants—are expected by the government to work. The government offers free Swedish language classes and job placement counselors to immigrants, among foreign-born women. In the immigrant-heavy suburb of Rinkeby, for instance, I ran into a man named Adam Hassan, who was an accountant in Ethiopia until migrating to Sweden with his wife three years ago. He got a job in a supermarket, she got a job in a school, and now, during the day, he watches their baby son, pushing him around in a stroller. “There, the mother takes care of the kids, and the man brings in money,” he told me placidly. “It’s different here.”