Challenging gender inequalities in education and in working life – a mission possible?

Abstract

This article deals with challenging the gender inequalities that exist in education and working life. It contemplates the kinds of discursive power relations that have led to gender equality work in Finland. In today’s conditions where equality issues are being harnessed more strongly to serve the aims of economic efficiency and productivity, it is even more important to understand how people who actively seek change have succeeded in negotiating equality issues. The article also explores the current situation by conducting an analysis that makes clear not only the discursive power relations that shape gender equality work, but also how it has been possible for the work to continue successfully.

Keywords:

• gender equality work
• education
• working life
• action research
• ethnography

Notes

1. The first author became interested in the domain of project work at the beginning of 2004 by studying what had happened to the promotion of gender equality, once the responsibility of the Finnish welfare state (Brunila 2009). She soon realised that equality work and many other activities of the welfare state, such as young adults’ training and guidance, had shifted to short-term publicly funded projects. This happened in the 1980s when the public sector became more market-oriented, and business-oriented thinking started to penetrate activities that had not traditionally emphasised profit-making. The second author began her career in equality work in 2003 in an EU-funded equality research and development project. Following that project and many others, she found that in the world of projects, gender equality has to be legitimised as a new innovation that increases productivity. This has led to a vague use of the concept of gender equality, and sometimes to situations, where equality is seen as valuable only if it increases economic growth. It is the experiences in publicly funded equality projects that the authors share which have led to the writing of this article. ‘Publicly funded’ means here, a short-term publicly funded project (by the EU, ministries, foundations, associations, etc.) which usually operates within or outside of the formal educational system and has certain pre-determined goals.