HÄN – EQUALITY, CULTURE AND WOMEN
HÄN – EQUALITY, CULTURE AND WOMEN
HÄN – EQUALITY, CULTURE AND WOMEN - on December 3 in Tampere was held a Workshop on Equality
between men and women. Hän the word in finish stands for equal – it is she and
he in the third person. When I first heard the meaning of this word I was
pleasantly surprised that this word exists in Finnish language and because of
existence of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis - or Whorfianism( a principle claiming
that the structure of a language affects its speakers' world view or cognition,
and thus people's perceptions are relative to their spoken language) – that
means that for Finnish people could be easier to understand and accept gender
equality more willingly than, for example, speakers of my mother tongue -
Russian in which everything has it gender – masculine, feminine or medium,
which defines only non-living objects.
While I was preparing for the seminar – I thought it
would be nice to listen to the people who know that the problem of gender
inequality exists – I wasn’t wrong. At the end of the day, my head was
exploding because of the number of thoughts I had. HÄN made me think about a
lot of things I faced and would face in the future.
Mostly when I start to speak about gender equality I
meet negative reactions and one forwarding question – are you a feminist? If
“feminist” is something absolutely wrong. A lot of young people do not see a
difference between certain individuals who aim to be a feminist, but do it in a
way people do not appreciate and start to think of a whole movement just seeing
one wrong individual. It is pleasant to see a mature and neat approach to such
a sensitive and important issue.
Jaakki
Stenhäll, Deputy Mayor of Tampere, made a brief introduction and spoke about
the history of gender equality in Finland.
Finland was the first country to grant political
rights to women in 1906, a year earlier women of all ranks demanded equal
rights not only to vote but also to participate in elections, men supported
them and spoke in Tampere Square, demanding universal and equal suffrage.
“FACTS ON GENDER EQUALITY”, CHRISTIAN VESKE, EUROPEAN INSTITUTE FOR
GENDER EQUALITY
Christian
Veske works for seven years with European Institute for Gender Equality, and
work together with European commission and parliament, presidencies, they are
located in Vilnius in Lithuania. Christian was inspired by one of the Moomins
stories and was pushed to work on gender equality problems. Gender
mainstreaming is one of the possibilities – they are developing gender
mainstreaming platforms [2] by doing the research on gender equality trough
three broad areas: gender-based violence, then gender statistics and Gender
Equality Index.
I am from Latvia and my home country people prefer not
to talk about the issue. Honestly, I barely hold back the tears while looking
at this circle [4], not even because I saw violence – because I saw the lack of
knowledge between young and adult people. When I was in school once we had a
discussion between classmates and one teacher – she asked us if we think rather
in Latvia exists inequality or not? I said that it exists – mostly boys were
arguing with me – in the end, I was forced to step back. I wish I knew about
this circle back then. That is why I found HAN too important to not speak about
it.
Christian mentioned the Beijing Declaration, I haven’t
heard about:
“Beijing Declaration was
a resolution adopted by the UN at the end of
the Fourth World Conference on Women on 15 September 1995. The
resolution adopted to promulgate a set of principles concerning the equality of
men and women.” I found a full document of Beijing Declaration it aims can be
summarized:
“3. Determined to advance the goals of equality,
development, and peace for all women everywhere in the interest of all
humanity.” [1]
VOICE OF CULTURE
Four
members of “Voices of Culture” Zita Holbourne, Tamara Tatishvilli, Imogen
Gunner, Christine Langinauer attended the workshop – each of the presentations
and speeches left on me different influence, even though sometimes I had some
kind of drops out – when I heard them speaking and had inflow of emotions and
thoughts – the strongest drop was when Imogen Gunner spoke I started to cry, I
think because of the awareness of what these people are fighting for and what
they are working on.
ZITA HOLBOURNE – EQUAL ACCESS FOR WOMAN TO THE LABOUR MARKET AND
LEADERSHIP POSITIONS.
Issues that impact and cause all sectors of the labor
market and culture sector which is filled by a patriarchal system, misogyny,
insecure work and lack of support. A woman being self-employed and alone
workers. Gender pay gap. This is not just on grounds of gender - we have to
look at this from the perspective of intersectionality – women are not
one-dimensional.
I was so shocked by the phrase “women are not
one-dimensional” – no one is, in the terms of equality, so it was the thing –
we should think outside of the box of stereotypes, when all you see in woman is
a mix of concepts of past years. While we were waiting for the start – we met a
woman – she told us an indicative story related to her work - at her work she
has to deal with situations when woman should go and do work – but she even
can’t get to speak – man speaks for her saying she is not ready to speak for
herself – in that kind of situation I have doubts rather I live in the 21st
century. It is crucial to look at intersectionality at all times. Even though
we know that discrimination exists it is crucial to have evidence of it – it is
important to produce data.
TAMARA TATISHVILLI – EDUCATION AND TRAINING: GENDER STEREOTYPES,
REPRESENTATION AND ROLE MODELS
Gender
Equality is not a topic for women only it is not a subject that women prove to
each other every day concluding obvious things – it is not only important to
get an idea amongst the young generation, but also to take action in spreading
it. Significance of elevating the importance of the topic of inequality on the
societal level and not to mere it to a specific sector film, music or anything
else is crucial.
Everyone has been influenced by a stereotypical
attitude or idea, stereotyping begins very early – even earlier than you start
to realize that you are a girl and should like pink. We want to back away from
stereotypes because we understand how painful the change could be. Those people
who are out there, who are saying that we face a problem, but we are the ones
to make change, we cannot talk to organizations and commissions asking them to
do something, if we don’t also allow ourselves that we failed at some point and
now we are ready to face it and move forward. It is very important to look at
the situation from two different perspectives because the kind of action that
is needed is streamed for adults because we are on a different stage of being
stereotyped and influenced.
Among young
people it worth to work on, because then the young generation will be less
stereotypical, there can be stronger role models that can drive them through.
It will always be harder to convince adults that the stereotypes, that were
with them all along aren’t correct and don’t much the reality they live in,
than the youngsters whose mind is still opened to almost every idea.
The main idea is to limit the pink-blue gap - the idea
of how should correct girl and correct boy look, to accept and work with people
as they are.
As I am studying in a cinematography field it was
interesting to find out about EWA Network [3] that is created to stand for
gender equality in the Audiovisual field – Film, and TV making the process. It
talks about what we should change the definition of leadership to erase a
stereotypical sense of what filmmaker looks like. In the audiovisual field is
enough actions to take action and they already try to do it through EWA and
Eurimages[3].
Tamara spoke about a movie “Aurora” made by Miia
Tervo, so I got interested in and watched trailer and it is something new for –
as it was said a girl behind the main character is herself, the issues, taboos
and all the things not spoken are in that film, so I’m definitely going to
watch and not only because of context also it is beautifully shot, as I can
judge from the trailers. A challenge of a filmmaker is a find way how to open
up our hearts to each other.
“The fresh new voice of Finnish cinema, Miia Tervo, is
a genuine filmmaker who writes her own scripts. Aurora is
more than the sum of its story and characters. It’s a fluffy romantic comedy
with a message that bounces around but trusts the viewer.”
IMOGEN GUNNER – AN END TO SEXUAL VIOLENCE
In the
world is too much of sexual harassment and it is the thing we have to live
with, moreover, it is not perceived as something society should fight with
firstly. Society accepted it as something normal - usual.
It is estimated that 35 percent of women worldwide
have experienced either physical and/or sexual violence at some point in their
lives. Sexual harassment growths globally, because of a lack of understanding
of an issue and ignorance. Sexual harassment topic is a kind of Pandora box
that permits many people to talk about this issue and connects to many problems
within the society we live in.
Within Imogen Gunner's speech, I remembered all the
cases I heard about in my home country about Sexual Harassment and that kind of
Pandora Box opened in Russia where a new law has to appear shortly. One of the
key things he proposes is to transfer domestic violence cases from private
prosecution to public or private-public prosecution. "A private accusation
is illogical and unfair. With it, the rapist is protected, but the victim is
not," it is the perfect example of how uninformed society digs a grave for
themselves.
The one thing is clear for now - we have to educate
people from childhood, we have to reeducate boys and men.
CHRISTINE LANGINAUER - SYSTEMATIC DISCRIMINATION DEMANDS SYSTEMATIC
CHANGE
Christine
represents an organization «Culture for all», based in Helsinki, Finland. She
promotes the accessibility of equal treatment of all and diversity.
We all know that the thing won’t work, equality will
never be achieved if we keep going as we are, instead we should think about how
we can change the structure in the order to make equality happened.
Equality will never be achieved if we keep going at
the same pace, instead, we should think about how we can change the structure
to achieve what we want.
This picture visualizes the situation [5]. In the
first image, flowers of different sizes need support for growth, so we treat
them the same way, but as we can see, some plants still can’t catch up, in the
third image the answer is found - we need to provide additional support to some
groups so that they reach the same level of development.
This shows that in the first case, for example, exists
the category of women that are privileged, as well as fewer privileged groups,
and you can be intersected by age, race, sex, etc. This is very important when
you learn and identify norms in order to be able to change them. And that is what we need to do.
Summary
To conclude, I would like to express my
strong respect to the people, who work to achieve gender equality and struggles
to prove that all the people in the world deserve equal treatment and right not
depending on gender, race or nationality. Through the report, I expressed my
feelings and thoughts about the discussed topic, so it is needed to say that I
am deeply impressed and touched by the workshop and people who attended this
event.
Alina Popa 2019, Tampere
Attachment:
1.
Beijing Declaration: https://www.un.org/en/events/pastevents/pdfs/Beijing_Declaration_and_Platform_for_Action.pdf
2.
European Institute for Gender
Equality
3.
EWA NETWORK https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ni9EwWEDIyI
Eurimages and gender equality https://www.coe.int/en/web/eurimages/gender-equality
4.
5. 
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