TORINO
GM in Turin
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 Opportunitą (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 Opportunitą (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 Opportunitą (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.