Equality Work in Finnish Ministries

The aim of this thesis is to contribute to knowledge about the equality work in public sector organisations. Especially, my aim is to bring light into everyday experiences of doing equality work. This is achieved through interviewing equality workers in Finnish ministries. The study draws also on my personal experiences as an equality consultant. The main question I ask is: Which issues influence the content of equality work? According to feminist research, promoting equality is always a political process, which includes conflicting interests. These conflicting interests are, however, not visible in official descriptions of equality work. For example, ministries’ equality policies mostly hide the various interests under vague definitions and beautiful structures. Despite the invisibility of the tensions in written documents, equality workers describe the negotiative nature of equality work by providing examples of equality negotiations in their organisations. In my analysis I conclude that equality workers are aware of their organisations’ capacities to change and, in their work, they adapt to these limitations by choosing their strategies to do equality work accordingly. The content of equality work reflects the strategies, which are carefully chosen based on the knowledge about the organisation. I argue that this process of choosing equality strategies by
equality workers is one of the overlooked factors shaping equality work in organisations.