In the service of justice

(translated from Swedish)



For almost a decade, Amanda Lundeteg with her Allbright Foundation has been a thorn in the side of listed companies that do not have equal management teams. She was recently awarded the Kerstin Hesselgren award by Sweden's HR Association and is more tagged than ever.

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For her work for equality and diversity, Amanda Lundeteg, CEO at Allbright, was awarded this year's Kerstin Hesselgren prize by Sweden's HR Association.

The commitment to an equal labor market came as a surprise, in a way. Amanda Lundeteg was sitting in the school desk at Uppsala University where she studied economics when she realized that even though she was in a class with as many women as men, it was the latter who were noticed. It was the guys who obviously talked right out in the lessons and gave the spontaneous speeches at the student dinners. The literature we read was written by men and the lecturers were men, but it became most clear when we discussed fictional ›cases‹, which were always described with a male. The realization hit her. Already there, among young students, it is not equal. I thought that if it is like this now, and those sitting around me are the managers of the future, then it will be so much longer. I completely surrendered to the fact that inequality really exists. Not much later Amanda Lundeteg saw a poster with a provocative headline: 100 listed companies that think the best women's movement is the one in bed. Behind the campaign was the Allbright foundation, which works for equality and diversification in the business world.



The boldness, the mapping, the tonality – Amanda Lundeteg was captured. She contacted Allbright and asked to intern with them: 'I can do anything!'. That's how it began. As an intern in the then small organization, she was given great freedoms, which she made something of: interviewed gender equality profiles as well as researchers, introduced a volunteer initiative and made sure to take a bigger place on social media. When the CEO decided to move on a year later, they chose to give Amanda Lundeteg the CEO job. Today, nine years later, she has grown the foundation from one employee to eight and ten volunteers, moved from focusing solely on gender to reviewing several areas of discrimination and opened an office in Germany. But above all, she has ensured that the issue of equality and diversity is always on the table in the social debate. Something that was highlighted in the justification when Sweden's HR Association awarded her this year's Kerstin Hesselgren prize.



I didn't know much about Kerstin Hesselgren, which says something about how poorly I, and probably others with me, know women in history. Now I know what a pioneer she was in working for equality policy issues. It is in her spirit that we work! We met early one morning in Amanda Lundeteg's apartment in Södermalm in Stockholm. She is on parental leave with her second son but has already had time for a radio interview in the morning in connection with the award. Now she stands brushing her teeth with her baby on one hip and tells us that she is not actually working at all during this parental leave, unlike the last one. Then I was up and running almost immediately, but discovered that I often got annoyed with my son, that he didn't fall asleep when I had an important meeting. Now I've pretty much put everything on hold, it's been so good,' she says.





Almost a decade after her capitulation to the fact of inequality, the flame has hardly stopped burning. I feel very positive. In other periods, I am driven more by anger and impatience because things are not progressing faster. I am frustrated with the conservative feminism that has emerged in recent years - that women should do the traditionally feminine thing. It is not sustainable that we should get women out into working life at the same time that they should take primary responsibility for home and children. Then it's better to try to get men to do more of the traditionally feminine things.

snip