Think Diverse Bocconi University

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.