Local Gender Gap Measurement in Europe: Provincial Adaptation within a Gender Mainstreaming Approach

Measures of horizontal inequality (as gender gap) are a fundamental support for planning and implementing policies. As required by the EU agenda, at all levels of policy making one should adopt a Gender Mainstreaming approach. In these terms, the Italian context can be currently analysed at the national (NUTS0) and at the regional (NUTS2) level. However, currently no tools are provided for more local analyses (i.e., at the provincial level). The aim of this paper is to produce provincial (NUTS3) estimates for the gender gap phenomenon focusing on the Italian context. Our method relies on adapting the EU gender gap composite index (EGEI) to the provincial level. The index adaptation follows Official Statistics’ standards. However, we also consider experts’ critiques about the original version of such an index; this leaded us to develop additional local adaptation experiments. Our estimates allow us on the one hand to describe gender gap heterogeneity in the Italian local context, on the other hand to study spatial relationships among different subareas. In order to develop such a spatial study, we also refer to the Official Statistics framework.