Press Release, January 30, 2014

Today activists from YABLOKO’s Gender Faction held a meeting with representatives of the Women’s Organisation of the Swedish People’s Party of Finland – Carola Sundquist, Chair, and Tatyana Ljungqvist, Vice Chair – at the Moscow office of the YABLOKO party. The topic of discussion was the women’s movement in Finland. Olga Radayeva, Deputy Chair of YABLOKO’s Gender Faction, moderated the discussion.

The event was opened by the Chair of YABLOKO’s Gender Faction Galina Mikhaleva. She recalled that once Finland was a part of Russia, but in spite of the historical interaction, Finland made a great progress in gender equality as compared to Russia. “Nevertheless, even in Finland, despite this progress, there is still a lot of questions related to conventional gender roles and the conservative moods of the population,” she said.

Mikhaleva also noted that Russia and Finland had been moving in different directions; whereas Finland was actively developing in gender equality issues, while Russia was moving toward patriarchal trends – the “conservative turn” according to Russia’s President.

Tatiana Ljungqvist told that she moved to Finland in the early 1990s from Novosibirsk.

In Finlad she is producer, just as she was in Russia. “I moved to a small village on the coast of Finland, where most of population was Swedish speaking, and certainly I also studied Finnish,” Tatyana said. According to Tatyana, if a person is active in Finland, then he or she very naturally gets involved in political and social movements, she herself started her political career with the topic of migration.

Ljungqvist also told about women’s rights in the history of Finland, as well as about establishment of Women’s Organisation. “I am mainly dealing with organization and planning,” she said.

There are only 30 local branches of the party across the country, which is due to a comparatively small size of the territory and the size of the Swedish speaking population amounting to six per cent of the total population, i.e. 330,000 people. “Our most important activity is support of our local branches and work with them. If they are not very active, our job is to stir them up, ” Ljungqvist said. And this involves carefully thought over strategies how this can be done.

“In general women in the regions want to have discussions over a cup of coffee. We have been trying to show them that if they run for municipal elections, they will have more opportunities to make important decisions affecting, for example, their children,” she said. To do this party analyses the situation in the regions, collects proposals from the regional branches and develops a special strategy for each region.

Carola Sundquist, Chair of the Woman’s Organisation of the SFP party, noted that she came from a small town with 20,000 inhabitants only. She said that she had been very active in the women’s faction of the Swedish People’s Party for four years already.

Carola Sundquist also told that the SFP Women’s Faction was over 100 years, in fact the organisation emerged when women were granted suffrage in 1906. “And now and then we have been fighting for one of the main things – equal pay for men and women. Unfortunately, this issue can not be solved so quickly, but we try,” she noted.

Sundquist added that one of the causes of unequal approach to salaries is that women spend many years at home raising children. A woman’s wage stops growing exactly at the moment when her children come. Also the place where a woman lives is of great importance, as many of women live in the countryside prefer to stay at home. At the same time, according to different studies, the most successful companies are those where an equal number of men and women work.

Another priority in the work of the SFP Women Organization is work in counteracting violence against women. Sundquist noted that every year 20-25 women are killed due to domestic violence. Such statistical data raised concern in the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women which took a decision to adopt active measures in dealing with such a situation. On the 27th of November, the International Day for Elimination of Violence Against Women, Finland hosts various events dedicated to this topic.

In addition, the SFP Women’s Faction has been fighting for the law against prostitution. This law operates in Sweden, but Finland has no such law. “Our colleagues have been working closely with Minister of Justice Anna-Maja Henriksson, they are investigating the issue, and it has become clear in the course of such work that our country needs such a law,” Carola Sundquist noted.

At the end of the meeting the guests answered numerous questions from the audience, including the specifics of the electoral system in Finland and the juvenile justice system.