I have had the pleasure and privilege of seeing the formation of an entirely new academic discipline, dedicated to the crucially important matter of gender equality and the entire concept of gender. It is actually amazing to think that prior to 1960s gender as a subject of study was not really present in universities, despite the fact that as a cultural order gender directly concerns all of us.

I greatly appreciate those women, a generation older than me, who founded the academic field of Women’s Studies within the second wave of feminism. As the present chair of the Association for Gender Studies in Finland, previously known as the Association for Women’s Studies in Finland (SUNS), I carry on this tradition. I am extremely proud that SUNS organises the annual large gender studies conference ”Sukupuolentutkimuksen päivät” and publishes the quarterly academic journal,  Sukupuolentutkimus.

The University of Helsinki hosts many large-scale Gender Studies conferences: the Christina Conference of Gender Studies has already become an international brand.

The Nordic countries are globally an important forefront for gender change, for politicising gender, and for thinking gender. The rest of the world looks up to us on questions of maternity leave, stay-at-home-dads, the linking of development aid and gender mainstreaming, and the quality of academic research on gender. There is a lot of collaboration between Nordic universities. One of my dreams is to see Finland shine as brightly as Sweden in these matters. InterGender is a Nordic-hosted gender studies partnership consortium for research training, and brings together large European Gender Studies centres as participants. I have actively taken part in developing this co-operation within InterGender.

The field of feminist philosophy also has its own international organisation, International Association of Women in Philosophy (IAPh), and I have been a member of the board of IAPh for some time. IAPh symposia have widened our view, too often limited to Europe and the US, further to Asia and Australia – feminist philosophy is alive and well around the world.

Further information

http://www.women-philosophy.org

Pulkkinen opening the XV International Association of Women Philosophers (IAPh) Symposium at the University of Alcalá de Henares in Spain, 24 June, 2014, and chairing the discussion after Judith Butler’s keynote presentation.

The University of Paris 8 hosted a 40th anniversary celebration of its Gender Studies program last year - they were Europe’s first educational institution to start granting MA and PhD degrees in Gender Studies in 1974. I was invited to give a presentation in Paris at this event in which the institutionalisation and globalisation of Gender Studies was being discussed.

’Genre: Une question internationale (3/4) : existe-t-il des études de genre à l’éuropéenne?’ (‘Gender: an international issue. Is there a European Gender Studies’) Interview with Pulkkinen on French radio station, France Culture  programme 28 May, 2014.