Pursuing change

Dear all,

For a while now, I have been looking for ways to participate in promoting values and projects that I find important. I’m currently working as an academic researcher, and I feel that my work contributes very little to the issues that our world is currently dealing with and I wish I could do more. In this day of social media, reaching millions of people is easier than it has ever been and with my love of writing, starting a blog is the obvious thing to do. My interests have always been varied and there are so many worthy cases to fight for that deciding the topic of my blog was not easy. In the end, the last 6 months decided the topic for me. This will be a blog portraying inspirational women and discussing gender equality issues as well promoting female talent. As you can ques, the #MeToo campaign and the follow up #TIMESUP, have been big influences on my decision, which was further supported by my own experiences.

I’m originally from Finland, a country which is well known for gender equality. Ours was the first country in Europe to give voting rights to women (1906). We had our first female president in the year 2000 (Tarja Halonen) and our first female prime minister a couple of years after that (Anneli Jäättenmäki, 2003). Growing up, I never felt that I was in anyway treated differently than the boys or that I would be worse at something because of my gender. I was at the top of my class in the subjects in which also in Finland boys are often assumed to do better than girls, such as math and science. Since that wasn’t the case for me and since nobody ever told me it was okay not to do so well in these subjects (or at anything in life) since I’m a girl, it never became something that I paid any attention to. There has been a lot of research done on gender differences in learning but most of them don’t and truly can’t take in consideration the cultural biases that affect our performance. It’s not our sex that makes us good or bad at things, it is how we are brought up, the believes and education we have been given that has shaped our own thoughts and expectations of ourselves.

Because of my background, I didn’t really think about gender issues while I still lived in Finland. My University department had more female professors and PhD student than males and throughout my studies I never felt I was mistreated because of my sex. I’m not saying that there are no gender based issues in Finland, because there are, but at that time, I simply didn’t see them or recognize them. My first internships abroad opened my eyes as I was, for first time in my life, treated differently than my male peers. Mostly it was little things, like not getting as much time and advice from my (male) supervisors or not getting recognition for my work. At that point, I was still too shy to speak out and frankly a bit lost and lacking the knowledge of how to deal with these issues. Once I came back to Finland, I started to recognize the same issues in my home country as well. Not in my personal life since I worked in a female dominated research group but in the bigger picture, such as the lack of females at top positions in some professions and the salary differences between the sexes.

In my current life, gender issues are part of my everyday life as a female researcher in Switzerland. I do work in group that has good gender balance and a great supervisor but that has not shielded me from the lack of respect and old-fashioned values that I have experienced during my years here. This was one of the reasons why last year I decided to participate in a career program for female PhD students. Our University has recognized the issues of gender inequality in the Swiss academic world and this program is one of the ways they try to promote female talent. During this program I learned a lot about the real issues that I will most likely be facing in the future as well. These things don’t get fixed overnight. At the end, in addition to learning to recognize the issues and the ways how to deal with them, the biggest value from the program was the boost for my self-respect and believe in myself. I didn’t think I had problems in these areas before but they were probably at the background, making me hesitate in speaking my mind or defending myself.

I know that my personal experiences have not been that bad, but they have opened my eyes to the reality we women live in and with the appalling cases from the #MeToo campaign, there truly is a need for open discussion that will hopefully lead to change in how women are treated. As one of my contributions to gender equality, through this blog I want to bring light to strong and successful women who, despite the difficulties, have been able to make a difference in our world. I have sometimes felt that finding a suitable female role model to look up to is difficult. Not because of a lack of suitable women, but because their achievements are not discussed in the media to the extend that they would become common knowledge. This is something I aim to fix with my blog.  I will also introduce female talents in different fields, to promote and help them in their careers and in becoming the future role models.

I aim to write at least once a week. If you have suggestions for women who I should write about, please feel free to leave a comment or send me an email.

-MP