Thomas Le Barbanchon, Associate Professor at Bocconi University's Department of Economics, has focussed his research on a little-known aspect of gender pay gap. Commuting time may explain part of this gap, as women are less willing to commute. This is because the hidden cost of commuting is higher on average for a woman than for a man, by a quantifiable amount. And since women look for jobs closer to home, they are bound to miss some opportunities compared with men. This damages women, but also firms who have a narrower selection base for the jobs they offer. In the second part of the talk, Thomas outlines what policies can be implemented to correct this distortion, and finally he makes interesting remarks on whether the pandemic provided an opportunity to improve the situation, by increasing the possibilities to work from home, or not.

It has been five years since the #metoo movement has become viral. In these years, the #metoo has been urging society to confront issues of sexual harassment in the workplace, a type of sex-based and gender-based harassment, which goes from verbal remarks to physical and sexual assault. Silvia Cinque, Lecturer in Organization and HRM and Deputy Dean for Diversity and Inclusion at SDA Bocconi School of Management, Milan, tells host Catherine De Vries about the transformations occurring in the workplace in the era of the #meToo movement. According to some data from the US, sexual harassment has decreased, but at the same time, men have become more reluctant to engage with women at work, the so-called backlash effect. Even though the situation in organizations still hasn’t reached a radical change, it is clear that people are becoming more aware of the meaning of sexual harassment and how it occurs.

Even though the number of women in politics has been increasing, the proportion of female candidates is still low. There is a surprising link between the gender pay gap and voter bias against women, says Julien Sauvagnat, Associate Professor at Bocconi University, to host Catherine De Vries. This, in turn, translates into parties presenting fewer female candidates in areas where women are discriminated. In a study, Sauvagnat finds that electoral districts with larger gender pay gaps show favoritism toward male political candidates in Parliamentary elections, with fewer female candidates on the ballot, especially when the race is tight. To improve this situation, the role of gender quotas is useful because it pushes more women into politics, but over time it might not be enough to obtain an equal representation of men and women and politics, and for changing people's mentalities. On the other hand, according to some research, voters change their attitudes and their voting behavior once they have been exposed to female leaders. This means that attitudes and beliefs are influenced by the presence of women in politics, and the voter bias against women in politics may progressively disappear as more women get elected over time.

All over Europe, the average number of children desired by a couple is around two, but the realized fertility is usually lower and, in the case of Southern countries, much lower – which led demographers to coin the term “lowest low fertility rate” when it plunges under 1.3 children per woman. In the seventh episode of the THINK DIVERSE podcast series, Letizia Mencarini, Full Professor of Demography at Bocconi Department of Social and Political Sciences, describes Europe as a continent all but homogeneous in terms of fertility, and less so after the pandemic. COVID seems to have made things worse only in countries characterized by lack of family-friendly policies and lack of trust in their future implementation. “Policies that create a family-friendly society and boost the fertility rate include income support to lower the real cost of children; incentivizing flexibility to reconcile family and work roles; and childcare services,” says Professor Mencarini to podcast host Catherine De Vries. “Data show how urgent and important it is to put resources and invest on next generations,” she concludes. THINK DIVERSE is a fresh and deep look at the issues surrounding diversity and inclusion. In every episode, host Catherine De Vries, Dean for Diversity and Inclusion at Bocconi University, picks the brain of Bocconi colleagues who do actionable research about diversity and inclusion topics in order to develop knowledge that matters.

We are wary of Artificial Intelligences for all the wrong reasons. The chance of one of them taking control of the world, as in a Hollywood movie, is thin, but they can still hurt large chunks of the humankind (i.e. women) or minorities (according to ethnicity, sexual preferences and so on) through the so-called algorithmic bias. Luca Trevisan, professor of Computer Science at Bocconi University, Milan, clarifies how Machine Learning (a type of Artificial Intelligence) can perpetuate societal bias or prove so ineffective in dealing with minorities to practically discriminate against them. “The use of Machine Learning systems may seem limited for now,” Prof. Trevisan says to host Catherine De Vries, “but their rate of adoption is increasing at an exponential rate, and we must tackle the issue as soon as possible. To this end, we need a multidisciplinary effort including computer scientists, mathematicians, political scientists, lawyers, and other scientists.”

Simone Cremaschi, a Post-Doc Research fellow at Bocconi, has spent time in a shantytown inhabited by West African farmworkers in Apulia, Southern Italy, during the harvest season. In the fifth episode of the THINK DIVERSE podcast series, he sheds light on this largely invisible and often misunderstood reality. “Shantytowns are real towns, built of cardboard and plastic, where thousands of underpaid people live with no access to basic facilities,” he says to host Catherine De Vries, Dean for Inclusion and Diversity at Bocconi. “There are restaurants, bars, shops, you could even buy a car.” Contrary to a common perception, only a minority of people living in such shantytowns have no documents: 23% according to Cremaschi’s estimate. At the end of the harvest, shantytowns are not completely dismantled. Most people go back to regular towns in Italy or Europe, where they endure only marginally better conditions, afflicted by poverty and marginalization. Some of them, though, live here all year long, in a parallel society built out of necessity. “They withdrew from the challenging search for a job and a house, because in their shacks they feel proud to live on their own means, in what they consider their home,” Cremaschi says.

Why is it so difficult for women to pursue a fulfilling career? Firms often require a temporal flexibility which is different from the one that employees (and women in particular) are willing to offer. This has profound implications on women's career prospects. Luisa Gagliardi, assistant professor at the Department of Management and Technology of Bocconi University, has researched the "dark side" of flexibility and tells host Catherine De Vries what she has discovered. Some companies make a willingness to work long hours a requirement for employment, but this may backfire because the company thus unnecessarily limits the talent pool available. The cost for a company can become dramatic when these spurious criteria are applied to top positions for which less qualified men can and do beat women candidates on this ground alone.

Paola Profeta, Full Professor of Public Economics and Director of Bocconi’s AXA Research Lab on Gender Equality, tells host Catherine De Vries how women have been on the frontline in the fight on COVID, because of their overrepresentation in hospital and care jobs, but have also suffered more in terms of job losses and restrictive measures that have put a strain on family relations. While previous crises mainly hit manufacturing and finance, where men are more numerous, this time the service sector, where women are disproportionately employed, has been battered harder. Furthermore, restrictions and distancing raised the amount of time devoted to housework and childcare, with women bearing the brunt of it. This endangers what was accomplished in the past in terms of gender equality, because research shows that a more equal division of housework increases the probability of women working. Having experienced a COVID-related she-cession, we now need a she-recovery. This means investing in family policies, as Paola Profeta says in the podcast: childcare, services, paternity leave (which translates into more responsibility sharing), promoting equal pay, stamping out cultural bias.

Effective government support can reduce poverty rates even in the thick of a pandemic, when unemployment rates reach a record high. In the first episode of the Think Diverse podcast series, Zachary Parolin tells the story of how poverty rates in the US dropped to a record low in 2020, lifting three million Americans above the poverty line. Dr Parolin, an Assistant Professor at Bocconi University, Milan, tells host Catherine De Vries that, when unemployment raised to 20%, a level not seen since the Great Depression, the American federal government stepped in like never before with new forms of cash assistance, capable of lowering the poverty rate in the US from 19.8% in 2019 to 9.1% in 2020. Such forms of assistance included stimulus checks, extended access to unemployment benefits, and, in 2021, unconditional child benefits. The key lesson of the pandemic period in terms of fight on poverty, Parolin says, is that high unemployment and economic shocks have not to necessarily raise poverty or material hardship. Governments have the responsibility and the capability to reverse the process with direct income support. A more generous welfare state is good for all the families.

Touched by a very personal experience, Nicoletta Balbo, Assistant Professor at Bocconi’s Department of Social and Political Sciences, started to look at the social impact of disease and disability. She soon discovered that there is very little research on how families are influenced by the presence of one or more member with disabilities. The first problem is marginalization, whether voluntary or imposed by social norms, or both. Being "invisible", these families are also likely to be ignored or overlooked by policymakers. Research then is not just an instrument to gather more solid insight and knowledge but also a necessary step if we want more effective relief policies to be undertaken. Nicoletta, in this talk with host Catherine De Vries, makes a gripping list of how disabilities can affect not just the individuals but their families as well. Lost opportunities, psychological strain, marital tensions are just the tip of an iceberg.