Quale qualità del lavoro per le donne nella meccanica modenese? Una ricerca sul campo

The concept of “Quality of Work” (in Italian, QdL) has a central role in the analysis of the working conditions. It becomes even more actual and important when the economy is going through an extended crisis and the analysis concernes the conditions of working life of women employed in a sector considered typically male as the engineering one. The paper analyzes, through the methodologies of automatic text analysis, twelve interviews realized in 2012 in the context of the project “SONIA. The mechanics of women”, a research project developed by Officina Emilia initiative of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. The three firms (BD Torneria, WAM, TetraPak) are located in the engineering district of the province of Modena, but they are extremely different for dimension, typology and for the policies reserved to female workers. The aim of the paper is to identify which words are used by interviewees to describe the different dimensions of the Quality of Work that can be found in literature and to verify if and how these words change depending on the variables linked to size of the firm, its typology and to gender policies.