The University of Eastern Finland has just announced the winner of the 2020 Gender Equality and Equal Opportunities Award, and presented the award to Senior Lecturer, Researcher Anne-Mari Souto, with Senior Lecturer Satu Tuomainen being recognised with an honourable mention. The Workplace Well-being Award was presented to the School of Theology.
Working to dissolve inequalities in education
Anne-Mari Souto was given the 2020 Gender Equality and Equal Opportunities Award in recognition of her diverse work dealing with inequality, and how to dissolve it, in education systems and counselling practices. Among other things, she has studied how educational paths are determined by ethnicity and gender, with another focus being on racism and multiculturalism in the context of education. She has also promoted discussion on inequality, and how to dissolve it, in the Finnish education and counselling system.
Souto points out that education is not equal for everyone; instead, it produces and reproduces societal inequalities and privileges.
“Lately, we’ve seen an increasingly strong tendency of education to create inequalities.
According to her, Finland has a blind spot to ethnic and racialized diversification of educational paths. Education is believed to foster integration, but an analysis of the kind of professional and societal roles education opens up to ethnic and racialized minorities has been forgotten.
“Besides preparatory and labour market training, minorities seem to have easier access to vocational than general upper secondary education, and to universities of applied sciences than to universities – sometimes against their own preferences.”
“In addition, racism drives ideas of how people should look like and what their background should be in certain roles: what people are used to, and what they are willing to accept. These ideas are reflected on how and towards which roles people in ethnic and racialized minorities are guided. On the other hand, these ideas also have an effect on the roles in which people belonging to these minorities believe they’ll find acceptance and employment. Challenging these discriminating practices takes a lot of effort from the individual, and this is why the focus of work that promotes equality should be shifted from the individual to societal structures that reproduce racism, and to dissolving them also in education.”
In her own field, career counselling, Souto sees plenty of potential to combat segregation in the education and labour markets.
“A particular need for change identified in my own research is to have the courage and ability to see and address societal inequalities not only in the life course of individuals, but also in the structures and practices of counselling. A practical example of this would be marketing: whose face is used to market this education and that profession. Career counsellor education plays a key role in making that change, and our response is research-based education. Another goal is to have an increasingly diverse student and staff body in the future.”
Towards increasingly gender-neutral language in education
Senior Lecturer Satu Tuomainen from the university’s Language Centre was given an honourable mention in recognition of her inclusive approach and use of gender-neutral language in both Finnish and English.
“I’m no expert in this theme, but I’m glad to see that students apparently are paying attention to it. In academic and field-specific language and communication studies, we talk about internationalisation with our students a lot, and about how language conventions change in our society. Gender-neutral language is one element of this.”
“It is perhaps easier to use gender-neutral language in Finnish, because we do not have female or masculine personal pronouns, and nowadays we also have gender-neutral alternatives for different professions and titles.”
“A similar phenomenon can be seen in English. I, for example, no longer use phrases like ‘ladies and gentlemen’, or ‘guys and girls’, and I seek to supplement the pronouns ‘he’ and ‘she’ with the gender-neutral ‘they’. Students are also active in these matters, i.e. they let me know of their preferred pronoun, and the traditional Mr, Miss and Ms prefixes in English also have a gender-neutral alternative, Mx.”
According to Tuomainen, it is great that the university’s language and practices change in tandem with the surrounding society.
“A lot of research is being conducted into gender equality also at our university, and many are better experts than I. But I’m glad to see that the use of gender-neutral language in education gets such positive attention.”
The award and the honourable mention were presented by Rector Jukka Mönkkönen at the proposal of the university’s Equality and Equal Opportunities Committee.
Low hierarchy is characteristic of a healthy workplace community
The Workplace Well-being Award 2020 was presented to the School of Theology, whose scores in the university’s workplace well-being survey have kept on getting better, also during the pandemic. According to the award statement, Head of School Ilkka Huhta has promoted workplace well-being by developing the school’s meeting practices and interaction, and by really putting himself out there. One example is a campaign where he matched the credits completed at the school by riding an equivalent distance on his bike.
“From the viewpoint of workplace well-being, a workplace community is never ready. It is something that requires constant work, as well as the commitment and participation of the entire community. That’s something we may have succeeded in, but it is the result of years, perhaps even decades, of hard work. We have an increasingly strong sense of community that is working for a common goal, despite there being many different degree programmes and subjects in our school,” Huhta says.
“In management, we seek to make sure that everyone gets to do what they are good at. An opportunity to influence one’s own work is an important element in academic work. In a small unit such as ours, it is also possible for the head to hear everyone’s wishes and goals.”
“We have introduced informal weekly coffee sessions to foster communication, and these have now continued online. “We also have a low hierarchy between teachers and students, and common events, such as basketball games and futsal nights, are important. We are now looking into whether e-sports could offer us something similar.”
“My role is to provide support for good ideas, and I’m not the first to turn down crazy ones, either. Our atmosphere is tolerant, and this makes it possible for people to share not only their successes, but also their failures in, for example, funding calls,” Huhta says.
The Rector presented the Workplace Well-being Award at the proposal of a HR working group.
