This comparative study between three small or medium-sized cities in the Nordic countries was aiming to identify and share best practices to improve labour market integration amongst immigrant women.

Marginalization remains a problem for many immigrant women in the Nordic countries, especially within the labour market. Research shows that labour force participation rates are lower among immigrant women, and that underemployment is more common amongst immigrant women. A pilot study realized at the University of Akureyri (Iceland) showed that immigrant women were one of the most vulnerable groups of people in the labour market in Iceland.

Many women occupy positions that do not fit with their level of education; despite having higher education-levels than men, 30% of immigrant women who took part in a survey in 2016 were in employment that did not suit their background, compared to 8% of Icelandic women. This difference has a direct impact on the income and immigrant women earned significantly less than Icelandic women (or immigrant men), as they were in occupations that did not take their education into consideration.

To address this matter, the project looked at policies and practices within three medium cities in three Nordic countries, namely Finland, Sweden and Iceland. The goal was to identify policies and practices that have an impact on the employment of immigrant women.

The green shift will require innovation and innovation in forestry. A diversity of knowledge and experience is needed. So far, this has been a male dominated industry. We wanted to engage more women and young people into a future in forestry.

Kvinner i Skogbruket in Norway, Spillkråkan in Sweden and Skógræktin in Iceland are all organisations working within forestry. The project carried out a pre-project in 2017, together with the Foundation KUN, which works for gender equality and diversity.

The Project gathered representatives from the four organizations to a three-day seminar to discuss how we can achieve closer co-operation between the Nordic countries. The seminar resulted in a plan for a long-term co-operation.

The interest of the network was to discuss the status of care work in the Nordic welfare states in the light of the neo-liberal turn in politics, and moreover, what this means for gender equality.

The discussion developed around the question if we can speak about a care crisis in the Nordic welfare states, and if so what are the characteristics of this crisis and the major areas of concern in regard to gender equality and welfare state sustainability.

The network organized a summer school for Nordic and international students and a dissemination conference for policy- and decision makers. The network cooperation also resulted in an edited book “A Care Crisis in the Nordic Welfare States?: Care Work, Gender Equality and Welfare State Sustainability“

People’s open access to online forums, comment fields and debates in social media is generally considered to greatly benefit the democratic dialogue in society. However, the tone can be tough, polarising and insulting, which puts strong pressure on the democratic debate and freedom of expression and affects women’s and men’s access to the public debate in the Nordic region.

This project has establish a new Nordic network focusing on sexism and online hate speech. The network consists of a number of Nordic actors involved in the work for equal treatment in society, including the Danish Institute for Human Rights, the Norwegian Gender Equality and Anti-Discrimination Ombud and the Icelandic Human Rights Center.

The project has arranged three expert seminars and put together an anthology with a series of recommendations on how the Nordic equality bodies and ombudsman institutions can work to combat sexism and online hate speech.

The main activity of this project was a Nordic MenEngage Conference in Oslo, February 2017. NGOs and actors working with boys and men shared and spread knowledge on how to work practically with boys and men to stop violence against girls, women and others.

Workshops were designated to the knowledge exchange and development on other practical issues: how to counteract gender stereotypes, promote caring and the role of gender equality policy in the Nordic countries.

Projected outcomes of the conference were a strengthening of organizations and individuals in organizations working with boys and men and for gender equality – beyond specialist organizations. The conference encouraged the development of new measures and new projects that promote gender equality. An online publication with comments and highlights from the conference was published.

“Confronting Gendered Violence: Focus on Perpetrators” is a conference held in Helsinki, 30 November – 2 December 2016. The conference sets focus on the contexts of perpetrators in the Nordic countries, seeking ways to break the cycles of violence. The purpose of the conference is to generate knowledge within the field and explore different ways to address domestic and intimate partner violence. The conference will present fresh results from a Nordic report on models to end domestic and intimate partner violence and offer a platform for sharing lessons, discussing the implementation of the Istanbul convention as well as forming a Nordic network for professionals focusing on perpetrators.

The project partners organized the conference in cooperation with the Finnish Presidency of the Nordic Council of ministers.

In this project, coordinated by Stockholm University, research and memory institutions collaborated in approaching the history of Nordic film cultures with a revisionist perspective. The Swedish Film Institute’s website ‘Nordic Women in Film’ was launched in April 2016 with the explicit aim of ”re-writing the history of moving pictures in the Nordic region from a feminist point of view, beginning in Sweden”.

From the start, the site only featured articles on women in Swedish film, but through this project, where two Swedish institutions (Stockholm University and the Swedish Film Institute) joined forces with Norway’s National Library and the Danish University of Copenhagen, Nordicwomeninfilm.com has become a platform for complementing existing accounts of Norwegian and Danish film history.

The website is now Nordic, but has also become more research based with the inclusion of material from researchers within cinematography.

The project has helped distributing knowledge about women’s contribution to the film industry in Denmark, Norway and Sweden. The Nordic collaboration has helped bringing forward details easily forgotten in the recording of national film history; among others the site Nordicwomeninfilm.com includes information in several different languages and with several different perspecives on female film crew, active in more than one Nordic country. One example is the Danish script writer Harriet Bloch, another one is the Norwegian actress and film maker Liv Ullmann.

The main purpose of the NBNP project “Women in the Police” is to focus on gender equality and diversity in police organizations. Special attention is directed towards the possibilities to combine working life with family life, and on discussing the working conditions women, but also men, meet in a male dominated organization. The project will focus on the recruitment processes of the police in the Nordic and Baltic countries from a gender perspective.

A seminar titled ‘Women in the police: from patrolling to leadership’ will be arranged in Riga in 2017.  Best practices and information on national actions taken in the Nordic and Baltic countries to increase the number of women in the police force will be presented and discussed. The aim is to find out whether the gender equality strategies have resulted in more women at all levels in the police. Did the strategies have the desired effect?