Year: 2025
Type: dissertation
Abstract: My thesis explores the opportunities and barriers to women's participation in gender inequitable societies and how to use social pedagogy in social work to empower women in their home countries.Working in women's home countries is situated in the global social work field as being a transnational work.My research questions are: "how to use social pedagogy to strengthen women's participation in gender inequitable societies?"and "what are the opportunities and barriers to participation in women's lives in culturally inequitable societies?".Exploring the opportunities and barriers to women's participation and the different types of social work interventions is important because the majority of women in the world still live in countries where gender equality is not achieved.Many women live in very different religious and cultural contexts from those of Western countries, which makes it important to understand the factors that affect their lives and the world through their eyes.Women's hopes, dreams, values and ideas may be very different from what we in the West think is ideal and desirable in life.Social pedagogy is an activity or education that aims to study human growth as a social phenomenon.Social pedagogy can be thought of as having a duty to challenge and correct social situations and phenomena that cause people to suffer.The study has been carried out as an integrative literature review and the research material consists of research articles.There are 10 research articles in total.The research material deals with the realisation of equality between women and men in gender-differentiated societies and the enablers and barriers to women's participation from different perspectives.Theorybased content analysis has guided the process of producing the research results and the focus of the thesis is on the inclusion framework model of Salminen, Lehtonen, Rikala, Kuusisto, Luoma-Halkola, Puumala, Sointu, Wallin & Häikiö (2021).The key findings of the study are that barriers to women's inclusion include cultural and religious beliefs and values, family attitudes, insecurity, male aggression and a strongly gendered view of women's role as mothers at home and men's role in life outside the home.Women's empowerment is enabled by social innovations, organisational activities, gender equality policies, legal changes and the use of culture and religion in an empowering way.Social pedagogy can be used to empower women through mutual dialogue, immersion in people's unique life situations, community action, creative methods and empowerment.
Author: Leinonen, Johanna
Language: Finnish
Topic: Social Sciences and Policies
Subfield: General Social Sciences
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7215310569