“…gender differences in students’ career preferences and that gender-related imposed choices of professions are more prevalent among females. Even though they had great potential for professional growth and future empowerment, many emphasized the gap between personal aspirations and realities”

Marya S. Rozanova-Smith

“The publication that inspired my interest in gender issues in the Arctic, and gender equality in particular, was the Arctic Human Development Report II (2014). AHDR II, which I co-authored, had gender as one of the cross-cutting themes, and it was evident that we just started to scratch the surface in respect to economic, social, political and other urgent issues that deal with gender gaps and inequalities”

Andrey Petrov

“My work with Indigenous Youth from Russia showed me that economic empowerment has not yet been achieved, especially for indigenous young women. […] if we talk about cultural economy, indigenous men will take cultural items to sell during political events and say that it is for the economic development of their community, while the women would stay in their communities and have no access to the money flow”

Varvara Korkina

'‘With a non-academic background, being a woman, yet with a strong expectation of justice, I perceived structures of unequally distributed power and injustices hidden by the formal principle of equality before the law. The principle expressed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was far from fulfilled. I became a researcher to be able to critically study power structures laid down in the law”

Eva-Maria Svensson

“More than a decade after having left the Faroe Islands, in 2003 I returned to the Islands. Upon my return what struck me was the seeming absence of women in the public media landscape. I recall posing the question “where are all the women?”.

Although, there has been social change in the Faroe Islands since then; for me, this first initial impression led me to ponder on gender and gender equality issues for years to come, and still does”

Erika Anne Hayfield

In 2018, Tahnee Prior and Malgorzata (Gosia) Smieszek co-founded non-profit organization “Women of the Arctic” (WoA). WoA seeks to raise awareness of women’s and gender-related issues in the Arctic.

Malgorzata (Gosia) Smieszek

The idea behind WoA grew out of a conversation and our shared realization that, amidst a steadily growing number of Arctic venues, initiatives focusing specifically on Arctic women – the successes they achieve and the challenges they face – remain few and far between.

Tahnee Prior

“Inuit across the Arctic, made up songs, sayings, or utterances unique to each child, aqaq. As a child, one such to me was “Kaaleralanngortartoq, Makkanngortartoq” and that aqaq was repeated each time I met a man from my birthplace, older than my parents. His utterance is like “at one point, you are silly, little Karl; and the next you are Margrethe.” He evoked Inuit thoughts on gender fluidity, and the transformative quality of his aqaq mesmerized and puzzled me. I was, after all, growing in strongly assimilation oriented Danish school system where gender was non-negotiable, static, and rigid, and captured the bearers of sex into stereotypical role. My academic work unravels that arrest using Inuit paradigm on the matter of gender”

Karla Jessen Williamson