Jyväskylä promotes equality

Jyväskylä meets the challenges of gender equality from two perspectives. The city provides and offers services for its residents and is also an employer for many who live in the Jyväskylä Region. The objectives of Jyväskylä's human resources policy on the strategy level concern changing management and well-being at work. Jyväskylä has an HR Policy Equality Plan as required by the legislation.The plan includes the objectives and principles which promote the equality and well-being of staff. The equality promotion objectives deal with staff management, recruitment, staff development, salary and employment matters, and combining work with private life.

At workplaces, the duty of supervisors is to ensure in practice that no gender discrimination and harassment take place at the workplace and that no employees are bullied.

Equality highlighted in all work situations

Men and women should be treated equally at all stages of recruitment, in the internal mobility of staff, when planning changes in positions, and providing staff with training. To promote equality, hiring practices favour the selection of a minority gender if the applicants have an equal competence and suitability. In addition, in connection with hiring and recruitment, the proportion of women in executive positions should be taken into consideration. Regardless of gender, staff must have equal opportunities for personal and career development. Staff training supports the maintaining of professional skills, on-job-learning, and career development. There are strong gender division in municipal positions, which means that men and women clearly have different positions. An essential goal of equality at work is that there are no gender-based salary differences between men and women. An equal position-specific salary must be paid for work which is the same and essentially equally demanding.

An objective of Jyväskylä is to combine its personnel's work and personal lives in a fluent way. To increase work flexibility and acknowledge different ways of life and needs, Jyväskylä enables dif- ferent forms of part-time work, taking the nature of the work into account. When organising duties and work, both genders should have equal opportunities to use family leave. In addition, appropriate work time arrangements, flexibility and observing personal life needs promotes successful operations, increases work motivation and commitment, while improving the well-being and energy levels of the staff, as well as enhancing the quality of workplaces.

Equality promotion is updated and carried out in everyday work

Jyväskylä will carry out a staff survey during by the end of 2010. The state of equality in the city, as experienced by the staff, is one of the focus areas. Equality-related questions and arguments are derived from the equality plan, which includes the principles and objectives of equality work. The responses indicate the current state of equality at the city's workplaces, while supplying information about possible problems and areas requiring further development. Therefore, the goal is that through the survey, information on the themes and matters, as well as workplaces where concrete and well-planned work for promoting equality in the city must be allocated, will be obtained. Through regular evaluation, equality work is updated and implemented as an increasingly fixed part of the HR policy and service production of Jyväskylä.

Even though equality is promoted in a determined way, it does not mean that all challenges could be resolved at the same time. Work on quality occurs step by step, and it is essential that the obstacles for equality have been identified so they can be affected. Equality work objectives can be divided into short-term and long-term objectives, which also makes their implementation realistic.