GENDER EQUALITY

HOW TO MAINSTREAM GENDER EQUALITY

- EXPERIENCES FROM THE FINNISH CONTEXT

Liisa Horelli, PhD, Academy Research Fellow. Helsinki University of Technology, Centre for Urban and Regional Studies. P.B. 9300, 02015 TKK, Finland Liisa.Horelli@hut.fi

Introduction

The fact that Finnish women were the first in Europe to be granted the right to vote and the first in the world to obtain the right to become candidates at an election, in 1906, has contributed to the "Finnish paradox of equality". Outwards, we are proud of the fact that the well-educated Finnish women are conspicuously involved in political decision making and that women are active players in the labour market. Inwards, equality is not an attractive issue. "There´s no need for mainstreaming as we are already so equal", are common arguments. And it is true that we enjoy extensive formal rights of equality.

Finland, like other Nordic countries have participated in the construction of the so-called Nordic model of equality. In the Finnish version, the model is founded on equal access to vocational training, wage- work/entrepreneurship, individual income and individual social security, separate taxation of spouses, and services enabling women´s participation in working life (parental leave, home care allowance, children´s day care, free school meals service). These issues are today regarded as standard elements of social and economic policies. Thus, a major part of equality goals have already been mainstreamed. The adopted model does not, however, provide for the monitoring and evaluation of the impact of these or other policies on gender equality in the daily praxis.

Consequently, the resistance towards equality issues is partly due to the gender-neutral or gender-blind culture of the public administration and politics, which hides the structural inequalities, such as the vertically and horizontally segregated labour markets, the 20% wage gap between women and men, and the imbalances in the sharing of domestic chores. As long as the deeper gender inequalities are invisible, the society cannot react to them.

These were part of the reasons which pushed the Finnish Government to put up a vast Plan of action for the Promotion of Gender Equality in 1997-1999, which also served as a Finnish follow-up to the resolutions of the UN´s Fourth World Conference on Women. This plan of action was implemented through nearly 100 projects (Ministry of Social Affairs and Health, 1999). One of the major endeavours was the "Creation of Mainstreaming Methodology", which was a cluster of projects by six ministries (cf. Figure 1 above). The purpose of the cluster was to create a set of innovative methods that would enhance the promotion of equality in the daily work of the ministries.

The aim of this presentation is to display some of the concepts and methods of gender mainstreaming and to give some examples of how they have been applied within the Finnish civil service.

Basic concepts

Equality, which is the corner stone of democratic nations, successful organizations and a basic human right, are time and space dependent phenomena. At least three historical waves of approaches to equality between the sexes can be distinguished (Horelli, Booth & Gilroy, 1998; Rees, 1998). They are the equal treatment perspective which focuses on the human rights of women and also on those of men. The women´s perspective stresses the empowerment of women and the added value that women can bring forth. The gender perspective takes up the relationship between women and men and its structural embededness, which can be seen for example in the vertical and horizontal segregation of labour markets. The strategy of the gender perspective is mainstreaming equality, which was officially launched by the UN at the Bejing Conference on Women, in 1995.


Figure 2. Three perspective to equality

According to the Council of Europe "Gender mainstreaming is the (re)organisation, improvement, development and evaluation of policy processes, so that a gender equality perspective is incorporated in all policies, at all levels and at all stages, by actors normally involved in policy-making." Mainstreaming is thus a strategy for mobilizing ordinary actors – administrators, clerks, leaders – to put on "gender lenses" and to enhance equality in their everyday praxis. The latter implies the application of both carrots and sticks. The carrot emerges from the fact that neither late-modern societies, nor organizations can function well or be productive and competitive without the full participation of both women and men.