This project is an innovation project as it lays the bases for new insights on gender equality at regional level in the European context.

At European level, the issue of gender equality is assessed as extremely important, as evidenced by numerous documents among which we decided to herein recall two, a Joint declaration and a European Action.

The Joint Declaration entitled “Gender Equality as a Priority of the European Union today and in the future” (14309/18) was proposed at the initiative of the Austrian Presidency of the Council of the European Union, by the Presidency Trio of Estonia, Bulgaria and Austria. It was signed on the Informal Meeting of Gender Equality Ministers on 12 October 2018 in Vienna and is supported by twenty-seven EU Member States. The aim of the Joint Declaration is to reaffirm gender equality as a priority of the European Union. The twenty-seven signatories called for a high-level and stand-alone EU Gender Equality Strategy and for a full realization of the dual approach combining gender mainstreaming and specific actions.

The Gender Action Plan for the period 2016-2020 (GAP II) stresses the need for the full realisation of women’s and girls’ full and equal enjoyment of all human rights and fundamental freedoms and the achievement of gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls. Overall, evidence shows that when women are given equal opportunities and access to resources and to decision-making, communities are more prosperous and more peaceful. The EU wants to assist partners in effectively using this significant transformative potential.

On the need of a regional approach to the study of gender equality, common inequality measures have revealed that, while regional disparities have been decreasing when considering the EU as a whole, they have been increasing within some countries. Every Member State has several 'inner peripheries', which are habitually located in post-industrial or rural areas and often characterised by high levels of unemployment, poor infrastructure, lack of skilled workforce and hampered accessibility. Strengthening social, economic and territorial cohesion, and reducing regional disparities is the main goal of EU cohesion policy.

From a sociological point of view, many authors state that ignoring the sub-national gender disparities may lead to misleading conclusions: most of the European countries experience regional gender disparities and the processes producing this inequality are generally at sub-national level (e.g. regional disparities in terms of economic development or cultural values).

European policies aimed at reducing gender gaps in the EU require tools suited to identify economic, social and cultural differences throughout European Regions and both European and National policies aimed at reducing gender gaps can be better targeted to those regions more in need for improvements. Evidently, local policy actions aimed at reducing gender inequalities can be better tailored on the effective weaknesses of each region.

This perspective is even more interesting in countries characterized by persistent regional disparities in terms of economic development, population structure, size, and cultural values. In these contexts, a national gender equality indicator risks indeed to be hardly representative of the entire country. This point is particularly relevant in these years characterized by an increasing number of claims for more regulatory and fiscal autonomy raised by several regions all around Europe.

Policy making is generally subject to budget constrains so that Countries and Regions may have set different priorities in the achievement of gender equality. The use of a single set of weights directly derived from EIGE’s GEI may result to be favourable to some regions and unfavourable to others. Therefore, a simulation study on the reliability and stability of possible alternative rankings of the Regions using alternative approaches to the composition of synthetic indicators respects the prioritization of goals that local administrations and central governments have set over the last years. Anyhow, for Regional Administrators having a list of benchmark regions that are homogeneous to the one they manage, is an important opportunity because often they don’t know to whom they should compare their region and from whom they may draw inspiration for policy making. So, it may happen to find that, for instance, a given Italian region is more similar to another region in Northern Spain or in Southern France rather than any other region in Italy. Identifying clusters of regions with similar characteristics and different gender equality levels is the first step to find the places where to look for best practices to repeat in other regions.

This results in lists of regions that, albeit similar from the socio-economic point of view may result to be very different in terms of gender equality achievement. Such a list would be very useful for policy makers to define benchmarks for the regions they administrate and to find places where to take inspiration for good practices.

This project therefore represents a first step towards a regional mapping of gender equality in the EU-28 countries consistent with the activities of the European agency EIGE. The expected results concern the possibility of:

1. to assess the evolution of inter- and intra-national territorial inequalities in a diachronic perspective by building a regional gender equality indicator for the countries considered;
2. to compare the levels of gender equality between the regions of the countries involved by identifying relative positions of the regions with respect to clusters homogeneous in socio-economic characteristics;
3. to assess the effects of European integration policies in mitigating regional gender inequalities with particular regard to cross-border regions and the persistence of subnational disparities such as Northern/Southern Italy, Southern/Northern France, Western/Eastern Germany and Northern/Southern Spain.