Pixel International Conferences

Presence of women in technical professions had over the last three decades a remarkable development however their incidence, especially in terms of ability to access to decision-making roles, it still remains low. If you look then the range of niche expertise, you can note that within several specialist qualifications, women are still given a role relating to creativity and education, but less to technical-operative or strategic decision-making professions.

The profession of architect and engineer, as well as that one of the skilled technician are a good example; not a little part of woman architects prefers teaching, often she is not manager-referent of professional or technical office, if not in collaboration with men; finally her presence in highly specialized technical and operative roles, such as diagnostic investigation or infrastructural building is still today very poor and indeed, in this sense, compared to no more than a decade ago, this process seems to suffer an involution, that could be more difficult to be recovered than its primordial conquest.

It is therefore an both horizontal occupational segregation, because it puts women's employment in a limited number of sectors and technical decision-making professions, and vertical, as it sees a particular concentration of women at the lower levels of hierarchy of technical roles, especially practical-operative ones (however, why are the restorer or interior decorator more widespread than woman-mason or woman- upholsterer? These operative and artisan professions in the construction field are very similar each others. It would appear a certain intellectualization of manual professions, when they are inflected in the feminine world; the feeling, to be better investigated, is that the dense policy statement of formal and substantive equality in training and professionalization, also in terms of compensation, has produced new kinds of gender segregation, adapting these professions to supposed female attitudes, with an impoverishment of their technical and practical content.

Nevertheless, there are good experience, not surprisingly first of all in agriculture and in construction industry (social micro-housing, sustainable construction, restoration), where it was attempted a conversion of this trend through gender mainstreaming policies (in terms of integration and equity, not of facilitation) and building (defined as participation in the building of human capital), proposing -financing and woman cooperative credit tools, aimed at entrepreneurship, but even more at women technical and operative training.