Tuula Heiskanen (leader), Merja Kinnunen (Department of Sociology and Socialpsychology), Riikka Kivimäki, Päivi Korvajärvi, Anna-Maija Lehto (Central Statistical Office of Finland), Riitta Martikainen (Ministry of Labour), Liisa Rantalaiho (responsible for the organization post graduate education), Leila Räsänen, (Council for Equality between Women and Men) Minna Salmi (STAKES), Hannele Varsa (STAKES), Marja Vehviläinen (Department of Computer Science)
Financial support from the Finnish Academy in 1990-1994.
Finland has become known in international comparisons as the "laboratory of equality". Nevertheless the wage gap between men and women is biggest in the Nordic countries. Women also occupy lower employment positions than men. Gendered distinctions and differences in working life are often produced by hidden practices. What are they like? How do they work? These questions are addressed in the two books written by the researchers of this project. The writings open up an interesting view on the concrete practices which produce gendered results. Gender is done symbolically and concretely in people's self-definitions, in official texts and in labour politics. The topics touched upon in the writings include everyday clerical work in public administration, home-based work, collective bargaining, statistical classifications, ways of using the concepts of flexibility and productivity in research, gender in the process of computerization, the process of comparable worth in Finland, sexual harassment as a process, attempts to reduce segregation in working life, reconciling work and family in work organizations, in enterpreneurship and in social politics.
Gendered practices in working life, edited by Liisa Rantalaiho and Tuula Heiskanen (forthcoming), adopts a multidisciplinary approach and uses a rich empirical material to offer a broad perspective on gendered practices in working life from the level of labour market structures to the personal experiences of women and men. Some taken-for-granted assumptions of gender in the social sciences and feminist research are challenged by a view through the "Nordic window".
The book Työelämän sukupuolistavat käytännöt, edited by Merja Kinnunen and Päivi Korvajärvi and written for the Finnish audience, looks at the specific Finnish features that are embedded in the processes of doing gender. The focus of this book is on the ways in which the routines of doing gender are produced and reproduced and the seemingly fixed positions and spaces of women and men are challenged and transformed in Finnish working life.
Although there have been some numerical changes over the past couple of decades in occupational gender segregation in Finland, the overall picture has remained very much the same. This study is concerned with the practices and processes in and through which white-collar employees and their superiors produce, reproduce and break the divisions which cause women and men to be slotted into different locations and hierarchies at workplaces.
In theoretical terms the purpose of the study is to analyse doing gender, i.e. ongoing gendering activities in working life. Variations in doing gender and in their preconditions are studied in different work organizations. The following questions are addressed:
- In what ways is gender done in white-collar workplaces?
- How do the different practices and processes of doing and defining gender reproduce the gendered hierarchic divisions in organizations?
- How do the same practices and processes include both women's and men's consent to the hierarchic orders of organizations?
- How do the transformational processes of work and work organizations shape the gendered orders of the organizations?
The analysis is based on five years of fieldwork in nine white-collar workplaces in the late 1980s. The research material includes interviews with white-collar employees and their superiors and workplace observations. Three work organizations are taken under more detailed scrutiny.
The Reconciliation of Work and Family Life
A European Social Fund Project
The experiences of Finland and the other Nordic countries as pioneers in women's participation in the labour market and in developing the infrastructures that facilitate the work-family interface, has attracted much interest elsewhere in Europe.
The aims of this project are to:
- further develop gender equality in working life participation and in the work done in families;
- facilitate employees' adaptation to changes in work organizations by analysing the practices, needs, preconditions for and obstacles to the reconciliation of work and family in different kinds of workplaces and in different phases of family life;
- discover innovative means of reconciling working life and family in Finnish and European workplaces;
- develop such means and to carry out experiments at workplaces;
- increase public awareness of these means.
The part of the project, which is conducted in the WRC, will set out to create systems for analysing:
- the labour market effects of childcare leaves on individual, on workplace and on labour market levels;
- the needs, preconditions for and obstacles to men's and women's use of childcare leaves;
- how family organizes working life?
Further objectives include the creation of systems of analysis with which good practices of reconciling work and family life can be identified; the development of innovative practices of reconciling work and family life; the collection of information on European models and innovations on reconciling work and family life, studying them against Finnish family policy systems and workplace practices; and developing and providing education and information services at workplaces and in the media in order to inform people about good and innovative practices in reconciling work and family life.
The target groups are employers as well as female and male employees in female and male-dominated and gender-equal workplaces that vary in terms of size, sector, working time patterns and organization of work.
The project started up in September 1995 and will be completed by 1999.
The project consists of four independent subprojects. The subprojects are carried out by Stakes (National Research and Development Centre for Welfare and Health), Work Research Centre at University of Tampere, Institute of Occupational Health, and Psychology Consultancy Tunne Ihminen. Stakes coordinates the project which is led by Dr. Minna Salmi.
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