Etymology

jämställd +‎ -het. SAOB (edited in 1934) lists the verb jämnställa, now spelled jämställa ‎(“to equal, to compare”), but neither the adjective jämställd nor the noun jämställdhet. Discussions on gender equality in the 1960s used both jämlikhet and jämställdhet,^[1] but in the mid 1970s, "jämställdhet mellan man och kvinna" began to dominate and this was manifest when the Swedish government in November 1976 appointed a committee, jämställdhetskommittén chaired by Karin Andersson, which later proposed Sweden's gender equality law, enacted in 1979, lagen (1979:1118) om jämställdhet mellan kvinnor och män i arbetslivet, or jämställdhetslagen for short. After this, the qualifier "mellan man och kvinna" is no longer needed. Jämlikhet still refers to any kind of equal opportunity (race, age, religion, ...) but jämställdhet and jämställd only refer to gender equality.