There was a foreign male student who came for exchange to Aalto University. Some day we were chilling with a big group of people on a beach. He tried to multiple times touch my legs pretending he wanted to cover me with a blanket from a cold (I didn’t want him to do that). Asking him to stop didn’t help. With time I learned that other women in that group of students and friends were scared of him for the same reasons. There was a time when a drunk group of girls wanted to go to the beach after some party, that guy heard it and made some juicy comment about how he will “follow them, stay, and watch”. Two of more sober girls of that friend group had to persuade the girls to cancel the beach plan because it felt very unsafe to go there at night after his comment. He was also referring to one of the university female tutors like “big boobs” and there were many other disgusting situations like that. The worst part was that male Aalto students heard all of that, but no one ever did anything to anyhow help us or shut him up. They went on inviting him to the parties. They tried to downplay his words and actions by “he is just joking”. I tried to tell one of those men, who was kind of my friend, how my “don’t touch me” didn’t stop that creepy student from touching me, to what my “friend” replied: “Well, with your accent it sounds so sexy, no wonder he didn’t stop”. That’s how it went on till the end of the exchange period. Women were feeling unsafe, were telling each other not to go alone somewhere where that guy may be, and were watching their drunk female friends, while the male students were enjoying his company, smoking weed, and playing volley with him. Aalto University men, we don’t need your startups, we need your solidarity and active fight with harassment.

I (a woman) started working on the same position with another colleague (a man) on the same day. We went together for the onboarding session and had the same starting day. We also had similar work experience (I would even say I was a bit more senior than him in terms of the number of work years, but not too much necessarily + I had 3 years of experience in another, yet relevant field). From the day one, that man has been talking to me like I don’t know anything and he knows everything. He was ignoring what I was saying, grabbing work tools straight out of my hands while I was working with them, because he felt like “he knew better how to use them and I needed guidance and immediate demonstration from him”. He presumed I don’t know anything about the work I was doing and couldn’t believe I have same years of experience as him. When I sent some customer service emails responding to customer complaints (I had 3 years of experience in customer communications back then), he would run to the laptop and check that “I didn’t write anything wrong” or ask me “to consult with him before writing”. He wasn’t a manager. At some point he started to control my actions even during remote work, even unrelated to work. For example, once I bought something urgent for the office with my own money and needed the company to pay me back. It was not a problem, I knew whom to contact. However, when he learned the company “owes me money”, he sent me a dm: “Hi! Please, you must send the receipt to X!” Interrogating him wasn’t helping — he would pretend he doesn’t understand what I am talking about. When I shared my stories with male colleagues, they were shocked — he was unpleasant with them as well, but not to that extent. He got fired and I was promoted to a manager position.

I faced this experience at Subway at Duo Hervanta. The staff needs to be changed or needs some training to behave with customers. Firstly they said me that they don’t serve coffee after 5 pm and after sometime the other staff said me that they do serve coffee after 5 pm but the coffee is over. The worst part was that I saw them giving coffee to other person who came after me. Worst experience ever. I felt they were kind of racist. I won’t recommend to any foreigner to visit this place.

The other day I was biking with my friend in the city, ofc talking in English, a middle age Finnish women shouted at us: “Puhu Somea”. :))))

I, a 25 year old girl, was hired by Etteplan as an embedded software engineer. It is a consulting company. Knowledge of Finnish language was not required for this position. I was assigned to a project where there were only mid-age Finnish men. At our first daily meeting they hardly spoke English, and since I was someone who did not yet know the project and could not contribute to the discussion, they switched to Finnish at some point. At the next daily meeting they started speaking Finnish immediately. After that I complained to my team lead and he replied something like, “They are not used to speaking English.” At that point I checked the job description again to make sure that Finnish was not required. It wasn’t. I started looking for a new job less than a week after being employed there. I found a decent option after only two months and was more than happy to quit my probationary period in one day.

After separating from my Finnish partner, I moved into a new home with my young children. I updated Posti to have the mail moved, but did not select my children, as they don’t usually get mail and I did not know that Posti was connected to the national register. Several months later, my ex-partner received notification from Migri that I was being deported in 30 days. He received that notice 3 days before I received mine. Migri’s justification was that because it appeared my children, 9 and 4, did not live with me, I no longer needed to be in Finland. Of course, they did live with me and even if they didn’t it would be in their interest to have their mother nearby. And the kicker was they asked my ex-partner for his opinion on whether or not I should be allowed to stay in Finland. Fortunately, even though our relationship was stressed, he wrote the kindest, most supportive letter defending me. I tried to correct the situation with the register, called to the embassy, called to my contacts in government, and I received an email and hostile phone call from Migri, telling that my ‘powerful’ friends were not going to save me and that if I couldn’t follow ‘rules’ I should not be allowed to be in Finland with my children. This started 17.12.2017, so I spent my Christmas fearing it may be the last with my children. I am unsure what changed the outcome, but they did not deport me. I received no empathy nor apology from Migri. For additional context, I was on a family visa, with minor dual national children and I was working full time. I am now a Finnish citizen. My motivation behind the application was to ensure that when my kids turn 18 I am not again threatened with deportation.

Common occurrence: A Finnish person in my family circle would often lament how terrible it was that immigrants would come to Finland just to live on benefits. They had no intention of working, just wanted to take advantage of Finnish taxpayers. When I said, you can’t generalize about people and I’m an immigrant too, they would say, “Oh we don’t mean you. You’re not the same.” But that was exactly my point everyone is not the same and they don’t know all the immigrants in Finland.

I was in the final stages of a recruitment process for which there was only me and one other person under consideration. The job was for an external role (meaning that it was outward-facing from Finland…dealing with those who are outside of Finland). The role did not specify a requirement for Finnish language because the people who this person would be working with did not speak Finnish. As one of the final two, and with a lot of experience in this type of role both in Finland and outside of Finland, I had great hopes. But when the answer came, it was a no. They decided to go with the Finnish candidate because they could speak Finnish (not a requirement for the role) “just in case someone wasn’t comfortable” inside the organisation. Looking back, maybe I should have appealed the decision, but I was just so disappointed.