Dipartimento di Ingegneria Gestionale

Promoting gender equality and inclusion in business and academic contexts

About the project

SDG5 urges to stand for gender equality. The project addresses the many themes raised by SDG5 through a multidisciplinary approach, which roots in quantitative methods. Current research lines are:

  1. Designing a tool that enables firms to assess their level of gender equality;
  2. assessing gender biases through data analytic techniques;
  3. studying managerial practices for promoting gender equality and inclusion;
  4. promoting female entrepreneurship through digital platforms and technologies.

Principal Investigators:  Cristina Rossi, Silvia Strada (DEIB), Mara Tanelli (DEIB)

Researcher team: Irene Bengo; Francesco Bruschi (DEIB), Valeria Bucchetti (DESIGN); Alessandro Campi (DEIB), Alessandra Guglielmi (DMAT), Raffaele Mancuso, Ingrid Paoletti (ABC) Paola Salvodi (DASTU); Vincenzo Rana (DEIB); Cristina Rossi, Silvia Strada (DEIB), Mara Tanelli (DEIB).

Funders: ValoreD, Politecnico di Milano, which funded an inter-doctoral PhD

Duration: onwards

Partners: Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering of Politecnico di Milano

KEY RESEARCH QUESTIONS

KEY RESEARCH QUESTIONS

  1. Designing a tool that enables firms to assess their level of gender equality. Measuring gender disparities and make managers and policymakers aware of them key for achieving gender equality. The project develops an index for measuring gender equality, which firms can easily compute through a user-friendly and interactive app. The app enables graphical visualizations of the index and of its main dimensions. It allows benchmarking and progress monitoring, also through inter-temporal and inter-industry comparisons.
  2. Assessing gender biases through data analytic techniques. This research devises quantitative indicators of conscious and unconscious gender biases, which can be ascribed to body-language, facial expressions, or language cues, and it turns them into quantitative features we extract automatically from audio/video streams. Based on these data, appropriate analytic techniques are developed, which enable a quantitative analysis of gender-biases that allows also assessing the impact of mitigation policies.
  3. Studying managerial practices for promoting gender equality and inclusion. Many firms are now adopting gender management practices (GMP) to promote equality, diversity, and inclusion. The project advances knowledge on GMP by developing a taxonomy of the most used ones, which considers firms’ internal and external contexts. It validates this taxonomy with partner firms by focus groups and secondary information sources. Then, the project analyses the effects of GMP on several dimensions (e.g., hiring, attractiveness, workforce composition, job satisfaction).
  4. Promoting female entrepreneurship through digital technologies. The project designs a digital path to foster female entrepreneurship in developing countries. The path has 3 pillars – education, resource access, and resource management and base on a digital peer-to-peer platform, which supports women in transforming an ideas into startups able to scale up.