Helsinki - The unprecedented election of a woman as President in Finland is a major milestone in the fight by women to establish professional parity with men in Europe, social commentators said yesterday.
"This is a very important step in the emancipation of women," said Ms Leena Krohn, general secretary of the National Council of Finnish Women, a day after the Foreign Minister, Ms Tarja Halonen, won the presidential election. "Men in Finland will no longer be able to say that if there hasn't been a female president, it was because no woman was qualified for the job."
Finland became in 1906 the first country in the world to permit women to run for public office.
On the day Finland got its first woman President, Japan elected its first female governor. Voters in western Japan's Osaka prefecture, centre of the country's second-biggest metropolis, voted Ms Fusae Ota into office as governor.
