GENDER INEQUALITIES AND SOCIAL CONDITIONS OF EMPOLYED WOMEN IN THE ALPS-ADRIATIC REGION. A COMPARISON BETWEEN CARINTHIA, FRIULI VENEZIA GIULIA AND SLOVENIA

Serena Fedel's dissertation is focused on gender issues, more precisely she has chosen to analyse the social conditions of employed women and the way they manage to reconcile the duties arising from their job with the ones connected with their role within the family. Geographically speaking she has decided to examine the above mentioned issues in the core of the so called Alps-Adriatic region, i.e. in the three bordering areas of Carinthia, Friuli Venezia Giulia and Slovenia. The aim of the dissertation consisted in analysing gender disparities and the social conditions of working women first in Austria, Italy and Slovenia and then also in of Carinthia and Friuli Venezia Giulia in order to find out which government has proved to be more sensitive to gender issues and has been more committed and successful in promoting a more equal society. Moreover tthe PhD candidate wanted to discover and point out which measures and initiatives have been more useful in order to develop gender equality and equal opportunities for all, so that such best practices could be introduced also in other areas in order to achieve the same goals. Carinthia, Friuli Venezia Giulia and Slovenia are neighbouring regions and to a foreign eye their landscapes must look similar, mainly because of the architectural legacy of a past when the three of them were all part of the Habsburg Empire. Indeed until the end of the First World War [although only until 1866 for the area of Friuli, when it was annexed to the Reign of Italy] these regions there ruled by the same laws and were inhabited by a very Catholic population. Notwithstanding the fact that in general women had to work hard at home as well as outside it in order to help their family make ends meet, the Catholic Church had been very successful in promoting the traditional patriarchal family model of the male breadwinner-housewife, according to which woman's role was defined by the three “K's” [Kà¼che, Kindern, Kirche] kitchen, children and church. Originally such a model was meant for the bourgeois family of the 19th century, but soon it became valid for all the social strata. It prescribed that the husband's role was to work for wage while the woman had to be the care-taker at home; if an employment was compatible with these tasks and/ or if the financial situation of the family required it, only then could she work outside home. The year 1918 marked the beginning of a dissimilar historical, social and economic development for the bordering regions of Carinthia, Friuli Venezia Giulia and Slovenia, even though some features †" like the strong feeling of devotion to the Catholic religion by the majority of the people, a peripheral position within their states and in respect to the decisional centres, as well as some internalized attitudes, customs and traditions - represented some common resistant-to-change characteristics. Now less than one century afterwards, the three areas are again under the umbrella of a common institution, the European Union, which counts gender equality among its founding principles, it has introduced the approach of gender mainstreaming in all its policies and programmes, and it requires all the member states to do the same. Moreover the three bordering areas are more or less affected in the same way also by world-wide phenomena such as the globalisation process (of capitals, work, models of reference, cultural trends, etc.) and the process of individualization of society. Given the above mentioned common features as well as the dissimilar historical experiences and social developmental paths which have characterized Carinthia, Friuli Venezia Giulia and Slovenia in the 20th century, the objective of Serena Fedel's dissertation was to investigate whether nowadays women's social condition and their models of behaviour in these areas are still similar, or if they differ and how, and which strategies have been elaborated in order to tackle the problem of gender disparities and discriminations. Through such a comparison it was expected to devise and point out some “best practices” which might be applied in the future in other regions in order to promote equal opportunities and the development of a more equal society. The main hypothesis was that the traditional male-breadwinner-housewife family model had left a legacy in the way household duties are divided between men and women, as well as in the different way men and women are present in the labour force (sectors of employment, hierarchichal position and status and power connected with it, career chances reserved to them, etc.). As a consequence it was expected that the various aspects of gender inequality to be addressed would have been similar, and also that the policies and initiatives devised in order to tackle them would have presented common features. On the other hand it was also expected that Carinthia, Friuli Venezia Giulia and Slovenia would have presented partially different workforce situations and levels of development of care services, to be accounted for mainly by the dissimilar historical experiences through which they went. Given the stress laid by the socialist system (when Slovenia was part of the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia) on the principle of equality between the different republics (ethnicities) as well as between sexes, and considering that it demanded all of its citizens to work, Serena Fedel assumed that Sloven women should have fared better then their colleagues of Carinthia and Friuli Venezia Giulia. More precisely it was expected that in Slovenia women would have enjoyed more equality with men in the private and in the public sphere, and that the network of care services in support of working parents would have been better developed here than in the other two areas. It must be mentioned that another hypothesis was also taken into consideration, namely that the weight of the socialist legacy could have been partially blunted by the dynamics set off by the process of transition to the market economy - i.e. the distance taken from everything that belonged to the old system, and the process of re-catholization of the population. While the second hypothesis was not confirmed, the first was supported by the results of the analysis carried out on the basis of statistical data concerning the labour force and the network of public care services in Austria, Italy and Slovenia, as well as in Carinthia and Friuli Venezia Giulia. These data matched also with the results of opinion polls carried out in the areas of interest on the topics of gender equalities and inequalities, and about men's and women's roles within family and society, as well as with the results of a survey carried out by the very PhD candidate on 30 women of the Alps-Adriatic area. Coming now to present the structure of the dissertation in details, the first chapter deals with the main sociological theories about social inequalities, starting with the classical ones which adopted a hierarchical approach and focused mainly on people's position within the economic field, and then moving to more recent standpoints, which adopted a horizontal approach in order to give account of the so called new inequalities. These are connected with characteristics such as one's gender, age, race, ethnicity, kind of dwelling, etc, so they cannot be directly connected to or explained by only taking into consideration one's profession, but nonetheless they affect people's life chances and achievements substantially. In the second chapter the focus shifts to the topic of whether and how the main sociologists took into consideration the issue of gender inequalities, and what they wrote about woman's nature and her role compared to man's. Afterwards the principal feminist approaches to the study of gender issues and their main points are discussed, together with the theories that were developed in order to explain the phenomena of the gendered division of work and the existence of patriarchal relations in social structures, focusing most of all on the reasons why women are in a disadvantaged position in the labour market, and on the relationship between welfare policies and women's situation.