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GM in Torino
State of Implementation of Gender Mainstreaming in our City
Resolutions of the local parliament:
The Regional Council - which is the legislative organ of the Piedmont
Region, of which Turin is the capital city - is currently revising the
Statute of Piedmont Region. The articles already approved by the Special
Commission working on this task include Art. 12, which formalises the
commitment of the Region to implement substantial equality of opportunities
for women and men:
1. The Region guarantees equal opportunities for women and men and, with
special laws and decrees, it works to remove all obstacles that prevent
full equality of opportunities in social, political, cultural and economic
life.
2. The law assures equal access for women and men to elective posts in
the local authorities and organisations, and to all appointments by the
Regional Council of the executive.
The Regional Council is also committed to promulgating laws designed
to implement Gender Mainstreaming at the local level in compliance with
the aforementioned Art. 12.
Fully in line with the changes taking place at the level of local legislation,
the City of Turin promotes initiatives and services to encourage equal
opportunities both internally and externally. These policies are implemented
by a number of special bodies that work in unison:
- The Assessorato alle Pari Opportunità (Equal Opportunities
Department), provides political guidelines and coordinates the various
equal opportunities organs at the local level;
- The Ufficio Politiche di Genere(Gender Policies Office), which answers
directly to the Equal Opportunities Department, and has skilled and
qualified staff to organise and promote initiatives to spread the culture
of gender and equal opportunities, in synergy with city associations,
operators at local level and various local equal opportunities institutions
(external operations);
- The Commissione Consiliare Pari Opportunità (Equal Opportunities
Council Commission), a corporate political body with the function of
submitting and controlling administrative activities concerning the
condition of women. Its general objective is to incorporate the gender
approach in administrative policies (internal operations);
- The Comitato Pari Opportunità (Equal Opportunities Committee),
an independent joint committee presided over by the municipal councillor
for equal opportunities, who has propositional and control tasks, as
well as promoting and monitoring equal opportunities for women and men
at the workplace within the Authority (internal operations).
Recent initiatives include two projects funded as part of the
Regional ESF ROP:
- Tempo per te [literally: "Time for You"], designed to promote
gender culture among employees and carry out a feasibility study to
introduce family-friendly organisational formulas to help reconcile
work and family life;
- Irma, a portal that hosts a network linking the public services in
the city that are provided by the municipal administration and other
authorities and associations. The City of Turin is planning a second
phase in which the service will be enlarged and intensified, becoming
multilingual so as to ensure integration of immigrant women.
These projects are important preparatory instruments and are designed
to lay the foundations for a common gender culture in order to implement
gender mainstreaming.
We should also like to recall that the City of Turin is working to ensure
that the municipal administration introduces a gender balance sheet in
the near future. This is a particularly important initiative, both because
it is the fourth of its kind in Italy (the first cities were Genoa, Siena
and Modena), and because it is so far one of the largest municipalities
in the country that is committed to moving in this direction.
Integration of the local project into the local implementation process:
Sensitivity to the gender approach and a focus on equal opportunities
are today well-established aspects of the policies of the City of Turin.
Hardly surprisingly, the local administration is very pleased to be taking
part in the Sister Cities Going Gender project.
This project does indeed confer added value to the policies, initiatives
and services offered by the City of Turin at many levels:
- At the European level, Sister Cities Going Gender offers the
various local administration organisations the opportunity to compare,
share and transfer the experience they have built up in the field of
equal-opportunities policies and mainstreaming. For this reason, the
City of Turin expects to enrich and to be enriched, while also extending
and consolidating its international partnership.
- At the local level, the project is characterised by the highly
innovative content of the planned actions. The introduction of a gender
approach into cognitive analysis is by itself an important new feature,
also at the scientific level. The application of the new methodology
for analysing processes concerning career advancement and the presence
of women in decision-making areas and the resulting awareness in the
cognitive processes that influence them are already a step in the right
direction towards a gender realignment at the top end of the organisations,
from which women are still largely excluded.
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