Let's change the world we live in!
Indrajit Chaudhuri
Entrepreneurial Product Professional experienced in SaaS/DaaS, Digital Transformation, Cloud & AI, Search, Advertising, OSS/BSS, Enterprise SW
Although we aspire to live in a world where there is no need to celebrate a separate day to talk about DEI, including Gender Equality, the reality is a bit different! Last year, the UN Secretary General stated, “Gender equality is growing more distant. On the current track, UN Women puts it 300 years away…” Extrapolating the rate of progress from 2006 to 2023, the World Economic Forum (2023) reported that closing global gender gaps in economic participation and opportunity will take 169 years, up from the pre-pandemic period.
Despite of the UN Sustainable Development Goals focusing on Gender Equality as one of the 17 goals for quite many years now, it seems the advances are quite slow. While it is easy to agree on paper, it has been hard to execute due to structural challenges and unconscious biases that we all have. While living in Finland for last 23 years, it is not difficult to say that it is one of the best places to live and work for women in this world! However, taking a closer look into the state of affairs, one can see that there is still a lot to do…
Typical challenges for Gender equality comes from the facts associated with equal economic participation, social protection to ensure rights over own life, time, bodies and decision-making at all sphere of life.
?Looking closely at the statistics, the employment rates are very close to each other – 71.8% for women vs 73.3% for men (2019). However, data from 2022 suggests that on an average women earn 84% of men’s earnings – 3416€/month vs 4104€/month. While some of the pay gap can be attributed to sectors of work and jobs, there are unexplainable ones as well. Typically female-dominated sectors like health and social services (85%), other services & third sector (73%) and education (65%) have structural issues and pay is lower than male-dominated sectors. Also, disparity comes from women availing more family leaves than men. However, it is interesting to note that in Finland, women are more educated than men, but have lower earnings at all levels of education. It does not stop at employment, but also influences the pensions which are on an average 80% of men’s average pension. Even if the proportion of women in university was highest (84%), highest proportion of men were in ICT studies (75%). According to data from 2023 by Women in Tech Finland, only around?20%?of the technology workforce are women in Finland. In Vaisala, today, we have 17% women in Tech roles, 26% in Management and 29% in Top management. And our aspiration is to target for 22% in Tech, 30% in Management and 34% in Top management by 2030. This gives immense pride to work for a company which not only focuses on DEI, but also especially on Gender Equality! However, looking at the overall picture in Finland, question remains if the focus should be on fixing the fundamentals associated with the structural challenges in pay or in inspiring women to choose fields of study which results in jobs with higher pay.
?When it comes to decision making at all spheres of life – Finland is much ahead in elected public positions with 46% women elected to parliament in 2023, 40% in municipal elections in 2021, and 57% in European Parliament. On average, women hold 33 percent of the positions on boards of directors of Finnish public limited companies in 2023. In the senior management of?state owned companies, women held 47 percent?of the positions in boards of directors, 26 percent?of chairperson positions and 22 percent?of CEO positions in 2022.?Since 2004, the Government of Finland has set numerical targets for women’s and men’s representation on the boards of directors of state-owned companies.?However, one challenge still lies in the fact that women in Finland have less technology degrees than men and that can hinder progress in managerial positions in public companies with exceptionally large number of people holding technology degrees.
?One other key challenge is in protecting and ensuring social rights of women, which are challenged by violence. Although, women and men are subjected to an almost identical amount of violence in Finland, there are experiential differences based on gender. Women are subjected to?violence particularly in relationships, within families, and at workplaces. According to statistics on offences and coercive measures, 74 percent?of the adult victims in cases of domestic violence reported to the authorities were women in 2022, 91 percent?of adult residents in shelters for victims of domestic violence were women. Incidences of sexual harassment in the workplace was 10% for women employees and 2% for male employees. Also, to be noted that according to a study commissioned by the Confederation of Finnish Industries (EK), 58% of those who had experienced sexual harassment in the past two years never reported it to anyone.?Question is not that we need to do everything to stop this violence, but also empower and inspire women to take the bold steps to come out and openly talk about these.
?Even living in a country like Finland, we can see there are huge gaps which poses challenges in attaining full gender equality. Unfortunately many of those comes from also our own unconscious biases. The unconscious biases that make people behave in the way they do. And only we ourselves are responsible for taking actions against those. Can we start counting how many times we have started painting the baby’s room pink or blue after knowing the gender of the child? How many times we have stereotyped our own children with toys specific for boys or girls? How many times we have seen us or our our kids segregating into boys and girls groups in social circles? How many tasks do we stereotype as women’s? It varies a lot between cultures, but it does exist in almost every country and culture that we not only stereotype but also force the do’s and don’ts for women. Let's stand in front of the mirror and ask ourselves? - do we know our unconscious biases? Are we doing what is necessary to avoid these biases in our day-to-day behavior at work and home??Can we help the women we know - to shake themselves to bring the change they want to see, challenge social biases, superstition, sense of guilt, and provide the inspiration to walk against the stream? We need a mindset change here, and it is us, who can make a difference, every single day!
?And looking into the future world dominated by AI in every sphere of life, we have to be even more diligent in not introducing the unconscious human biases and train our AI models for fairness and neutrality! As noted in the EU Gender Equality Strategy, it is very important for women to be involved in building our digital future. At the same time, let's also respect the choice of women working in other sectors and help towards driving structural changes needed for inclusion, equality & empowerment!
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?Above all, let’s resolve to treat people equally regardless of gender! And all such discussions should be rooted in a firm resolve around ensuring human rights to protect the planet for a sustainable future!
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