Differenze di genere nell’accesso a posizioni apicali. Risultati di una ricerca sul campo

This essay investigates factors affecting the observed gender differences in the access to managerial positions. The different probabilities of accessing managerial positions are analysed in countries characterized by different institutional settings and different level of participation of women to the labour market with special interest to the situation observed in Italy. Looking at measures of gender differences in the presence in apical positions, Italy is characterized by a severe under representation of women in the class ‘Legislators, senior officials and managers’. Together with a microeconometric analysis on European Community Household Panel and Bank of Italy Survey on Household Income and Wealth data to identify the individual, family, labour demand and institutional factors that may affect vertical segregation, results from qualitative surveys (carried out in areas characterized by different level of employment and different presence of factors affecting women’s labour supply) have been analysed to reconstruct experiences of discrimination. First evidence from qualitative survey carried out in Italy shows - despite cultural, social and juridical changes - that many explicit narrations about discrimination’s experiences emerged in the interviewees. We tried to classify them in three areas: an area of discrimination experiences concerning the dimension of social roles (e.g.: father or husband doesn’t accepting working daughter or wife); a second area with regard to the context of power’s roles and hierarchies (e.g.: subordinates, colleagues or others do not accepting/expecting females in high responsibility’s roles); a third area in the context of the competencies’ system (e.g.: women in “male” professions; women’s competencies and abilities under-recognized, etc.).Both level of analysis are used to disentangle constraints at work and strategies enacted to break what is perceived as a very deep glass ceiling at disadvantage of women in the access to apical positions.