28 March 2025 | 08:30 - 10:00 (MDT)
Open Session - HYBRID
Room: UMC Third Floor - 384
Organisers: Marya Rozanova-Smith (The George Washington University, USA); Andrey N. Petrov (ARCTICenter, University of Northern Iowa, USA); Stacey Lucason (Kawerak, Inc., USA); Embla Eir Oddsdóttir (Icelandic Arctic Cooperation Network, Iceland); Bridget Larocque (Weaving Wisdoms, Canada); Mervi Heikkinen (University of Oulu, Finland)
Session Description:
This session addresses two main themes.
First, advancing gender equality in the Arctic is a critical topic and one of the important priorities for Arctic social research and Arctic community resilience planning. Recent gender studies, such as the Gender Equality in the Arctic Report, indicate that inequality persists across the Arctic regions and all spheres of engagement. Additionally, gender equality has been negatively affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has had a devastating effect on both urban and rural communities across the Arctic, making it critical to understand existing vulnerabilities and gendered issues in supporting community resilience and sustainable development. The Session places special emphasis on Arctic Indigenous communities. We invite researchers, especially Indigenous scholars and knowledge-holders, and practitioners to discuss ways to address persistent gender inequalities, strategies for gender empowerment in governance, economies, and social realities, and Arctic community resilience planning through a gender lens.
Second, sex and gender disaggregated data is reflecting differences and inequalities in the situation of women and men. Such data is crucial for providing decision makers with the knowledge and capacity to develop well informed policies. Data feeds indicators and indexes across all sectors and at all levels of society to capture gender equality, social and economic inequalities, levels of gender-based violence, and impacts from processes of colonization, and empowerment and education. The lack of data and persistent gaps in data availability, in addition to a lack of protocols for sharing data, has been flagged in previous reports, such as in the Arctic Human Development Reports and the Arctic Social Indicators reports. During the development of the report on Gender Equality in the Arctic, authors of most chapters identified the paucity of data and the challenges this brings for analysis and comparisons. This continued lack of gendered and intersectional data, including specific data on Indigenous populations and LGBTQIA2S+, severely impedes efforts to adequately understand the dynamics of gender across the Arctic. Consistent and comparable data is the very foundation for understanding realities and inequalities across regions, countries, sectors, genders, and peoples. Objective of the session is to address the paucity and inconsistencies of gender and disaggregated data in the Arctic region. Session welcomes presentations on existing gender / sex / ethnically disaggregated data and on data needed to fill in existing gaps, and challenges to gender and sex disaggregated data in the Arctic region.
The Session is organized in-part by the Project "Understanding the Gendered Impacts of COVID-19 in the Arctic" (COVID-GEA), the ARCTICenter, UNI, the Project "Measuring Urban Sustainability in Transition" (MUST), and Project "Socio-Ecological Systems Transformation in River basins of the sub-Arctic under climate change" (SESTRA).