START YEAR 2022

END YEAR 2024

RESEARCH TEAM
Manuela Caiani (PI, SNS Coordinator)

PARTNERS
Simona Forti (SNS); Anna Loretoni, Maria Rosa De Giacomo, Marco Frey, Calogero Oddo (Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna)

PROJECT TITLE
Inequalities: Social sustainability and gender inequalities: culture, politics and economy

DESCRIPTION

This project explores with a mixed method approach gender inequalities (their perception and definition by the participants) in three different but interrelated fields (cultural, political and economic), rarely taken into consideration simultaneously by scientific research: in particular in academia, business companies and political participation & mobilization. The focus will be on some crucial (deviant or paradigmatic) Italian cases to be compared with other local case studies in Europe.

The issue of inequality or rather of ‘inequalities’ is a subject of investigation of scientific, socio-political, empirical and normative importance in contemporary democracies. As a multidimensional phenomenon, in its definitions, causes and consequences, this project will look at inequality through the ‘intersectional’ lens of gender inequalities – not only in relation to income, but also to access to services and opportunities – in a word to the broader theme of social sustainability. The economic and financial crisis of 2008 and the Covid-19 health emergency further increased the inequalities already on the rise in Western democracies and exacerbated the gender gap related to nursing and reproductive work. The crucial question becomes: how much inequality can democracy sustain? Gender inequalities in particular occupy a growing space of interest in academic research and policy debate due to the spiraling effects they can have on society at large.

In this project, through some Italian and European case studies, we will look at the state of the art, causes and consequences (perceptions and definition by the agents) of gender inequalities in three different but interrelated fields (cultural, political and economic): in particular Universities, Companies and (places of) Political Participation (conventional and unconventional, i.e. protest). Although existing studies have focused on how to measure inequalities in their multidimensionality, difficulties persist mainly linked to the availability of data, comparability of them, interconnections among different types of inequalities, as well as statistical problems (such as those, in surveys, related to the so called ‘endogeneity’, and causality). In this project, adopting a mixed methods approach that combines quantitative and qualitative data and analysis, we will investigate in details: i. University and gender inequality; ii. Companies and gender gap – new technologies; and iii. Gender inequality and political participation (including voting, women’s participation in political representation roles, but also in grassroots mobilization and social movements). Good practices and policy-oriented recommendations represent the main outcome of the project.

FUNDING

MIUR – Ministero dell’Università e della Ricerca (DM n. 289/2021).