Do you want to start doing something related to women’s equality in your organization? Sometimes good intentions can lead to bad ideas. Keep reading to make sure you don’t mess it up!
This week the Equality Journey’s core team: Christina, Laura and Malin-, was united at the European CEMR Conference in Bilbao, Spain. The CEMR is the Council of European Municipalities and Regions and they promote gender equality at local level through the Charter on Equality of Women and Men in Local Life. After three days, what are our general reflections?
One of our customers asked us to analyze their web page from a gender perspective. As we consider it more important and sustainable to involve and train the staff responsible for updating the web page, than to have an outsider doing the work and leaving no competence behind for future updates, we suggested two Equality Journey workshops with their web team.
Yes, yes, we know gender equality is important and a matter of social justice. Actually, we believe than women are as worthy members of society as men and there should not be any discrimination against them. I totally support that and believe in equal rights and equal opportunities. And I think I treat women and men with the same respect, I don’t consider myself sexist or anything like that. But, how can I be sure? What does it mean to promote gender equality?
What can you do when you want to start working with equality in your organization but aren´t quite sure where to begin? How can you find out what are the key questions in your field? How can you know how gender equality relates to your work? You may know that the information is out there somewhere, but how do you do to collect it?
The Equality Journey started in Malmö, 2012. The municipality demanded equality analyses to be done annually in every separate department, and granted resources for this work to get a good start.
Oh, yes, it’s a matter of justice, it’s a matter of quality, it’s a matter of employment branding, using resources effectively and it can be a part of corporate responsibility. It’s quite easy to find general arguments for why equality work is important. However you also need to ask what does it or could it mean for our organization as a part of our values and practices?
Working with change management during the last 10 years one has been able to see a pattern of which elements are needed to ensure the possibility for change. Working particular with equality we have developed four steps for change that is always present in our work.