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Liisa Husu

Tjänstetitel: Professor Organisation: Institutionen för humaniora, utbildnings- och samhällsvetenskap

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Centrum för feministiska samhällsstudier (CFS)

Om Liisa Husu

Liisa Husu is Professor of Gender Studies, School of Humanities, Education and Social Science (HumES) at Örebro University. She is Co-Director of GEXcel International Collegium for Advanced Transdisciplinary Gender Studies, a three-university (Karlstad – Linköping – Örebro universities) research platform of advanced gender research (www.gexcel.org); and the leader of Centre for Feminist Social Studies (CFS) at Örebro University.

Background

Liisa Husu is a Finnish sociologist and gender expert with a strong international engagement. She has previously been a board member of GEXcel Centre of Gender Excellence, one of the Swedish Centres of Gender Excellence, funded by the Swedish Research Council 2007-2011; Guest Professor in Gender Studies at Örebro University 2009-2010, Guest Professor at Linköping University Tema Genus 2009-2011, and is Docent in Women’s Studies at Tampere University, Finland. She is also an affiliated researcher at the Department of Management and Organisation, Hanken School of Economics, Finland.

Husu received her PhD in Social Sciences from the University of Helsinki in 2001, and was awarded the Gender Studies award Christina of the Year in 2002 by the University of Helsinki Christina Institute of Gender Studies, and the University of Helsinki Gender Equality Prize, the Maikki Friberg Prize, in 2009.

Liisa Husu was the National Co-ordinator of Women’s Studies and senior adviser in the Finnish gender equality machinery (Council for Equality between Women and Men and Equality Ombudsman’s Office) at the Prime Minister’s Office and Ministry of Social Affairs and Health 1981-1996; researcher in the Academy of Finland funded research project Gender in Academia 1997-2001 at the Department of Social Psychology, University of Helsinki; Research Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki 2002-2008, and Project Manager of NASTA - Women’s Leadership Research and Development Project, a national three-university project funded by the Finnish Ministry of Education, 2008-2010, at Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki.

Research interests

Liisa Husu's research interests focus on gender in science, academia and knowledge production; especially on gender dynamics and inequalities in scientific careers, organisations and science policy. She has been leading the GEXcel research theme “Gender Paradoxes in Changing Academic and Scientific Organisation(s)”, and leads the Örebro part of the Swedish Research Council funded project on “Feminist Theorizings of Intersectionality, Transversal Dialogues and New Synergies”. She was a partner in a major European FP7 project GenPORT that was pooling and organising extensive gender and science resources to an interactive portal.

Evaluation activities

Husu has been a member of the evaluation panel in the Uppsala University overall research evaluation Quality and Renewal in 2006, in the evaluation panel of social sciences of the Czech Academy of Sciences in 2015, and participated as a "researcher on research" panel member in the Uppsala University overall research evaluation Quality and Renewal in 2017.

She has been a reviewer of Elsevier New Scholar Programme; Austrian Wissenschaftsfonds Wittgenstein award; the Science Foundation Ireland Institute Development Awards, member in the evaluation committee of the MEERVOUD programme of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research NWO; member of the jury of the European Women Inventor and Innovation Award 2009; and took part in the Swedish Council for Higher Education's assessment of gender equality projects in higher education, funded by DJ, the Delegationen för jämställdhet i högskolan (Committee for gender equality in higher education). In 2017, she conducted a gender equality review of the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (The Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences) research project funding processes.

Expert activities and positions of trust

Husu has functioned extensively as a gender expert and adviser for diverse research stakeholders in Nordic countries, Europe and internationally, including funding organisations and Ministries, and has been actively involved in developing gender approaches in universities and research policy since the early 1980s in many roles and contexts.

She has served as a Vice-Chair and member of the University of Helsinki Equality Committee and was a member of Örebro University Equality Committee from 2010 until May 2018 (until the Committee was not renewed). She was member of the board of NIKK, Nordic Gender Institute, funded by the Nordic Council of Ministers, 1995-2000, and the Chair of its first board 1995-1996. She was also a member of the Swedish Ministry of Education advisory group on gender in European research policy in 2017.

Husu served as a member of the Board of the Tampere University Foundation in Finland, established in April 2017, which was to merge the University of Tampere and Tampere University of Technology to a new university, and member of the interim Board of the new Tampere University, until October 2018.

Ph.D. education and examination

Liisa Husu has examined eight Ph.D.s (in Belgium, Denmark, Netherlands, and Sweden; in Sociology, Political Science, Education and Gender Studies) and supervised seven doctoral students. She was Board Member of Intergender, the Swedish-International doctoral school in gender research.

International engagements

Liisa Husu has lectured and given invited presentations in over thirty countries, in Australia, Canada, China, Europe, Latin America, Morocco, South Africa, and USA.

International engagements include a keynote presentation in the Japanese-American-Scandinavian forum on gender in science in Washington D.C. in 2009; at the UNCTAD multi-year expert meeting on enterprise development and capacity building in science, technology and innovation in 2011; in the EC Social Dialogue, Committee on Education in 2012; at the European Conference of Women University Rectors in Istanbul in 2014; at the International Conference on Gender and Higher Education in Europe in University of Lund in 2014, and in the Gender Panel of the Second African Ministerial Forum on Science, Technology and Innovation in Rabat, Morocco in 2014.

European engagements

She has played an active role in European actions and research development on gender and science; as a partner in the FP7 project GenPORT; as researcher in the FP7 project genSET, a capacity building action project on gender equality and excellence in science; as a partner in the EU FP6 research project PROMETEA on empowering women in technological research careers; a partner in the EU FP6 project ADVANCE on promoting women’s scientific careers; and a member of the COST action Gender STE. She contributed to the EC report Gender and Excellence in the Making (2004), and was the Rapporteur of the EC expert group Gender and Excellence (The Gender Challenge in Research Funding, 2009) reviewing research funding from gender perspective in 33 countries.

Husu is the moderator of the European Network on Gender Equality in Higher Education, and its email list eq-uni since 1998, and has contributed to organising ten European Conferences on Gender Equality in Higher Education across Europe. She was a founding member of the European Platform of Women Scientists EPWS. In 2016 she was appointed to a Scientific Advisor of the European Association of Women Rectors, EWORA. She was a long-term board member of the International Sociological Association’s Research Committee 32 “Women in Society”, and is a board member of the International Sociological Association Research Committee 23, Sociology of Science and Technology during 2018-2021.

Publications

Her publications include Hard Work in the Academy. Research and Interventions on Gender Inequalities in Higher Education (1999), the special issue on Academe and Gender of UNESCO/CEPES journal Higher Education in Europe (2000), Sexism, Support and Survival in Academia: Academic Women and Hidden Discrimination in Finland (2001), Tiede, tieto ja sukupuoli [Science, Knowledge and Gender] (2005), Dold diskriminering på akademiska arenor – osynligt, synligt, subtilt [Hidden discrimination on academic arenas – invisible, visible, subtle] (2005); Leadership through the Gender Lens (2010), and Women, Management and Leadership (2011), as well as many journal articles and chapters in books. In 2013 she was among the invited researchers writing in Nature on”Scientists of the world speak up for equality”.

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