Gender and Education in Italy

There is no simple relationship between education and gender equality. As with social class relations, education both reinforces evaluation of student’s background and create new possibilities for liberation, and this contradiction appears at every level and in every aspect of the Italian educational system (Biemmi, 2015). Schools and universities are sites of intensive gender socialization, but they also offer girls and boys the opportunity to exploit their gifted talents and develop their skills. Education, therefore, is not limited to reproducing gender inequalities; sometimes it spurs students to think beyond the ideological limits set for them by society. In the past as well, the Italian feminist movement made visible both the entrenched gender discrimination of schools and young women’s rebellion against such challenges and barriers (Gianini Belotti,1973). Research and analyses on the nexus between education and gender in Italy have been expanding the range of topics and issues under investigation since the vibrant peak of the last feminist wave in the Seventies: fifty years of changes and shifts in the Italian educational scape have accompanied reflections on gender inequalities and segregation, male and female achievements, men’s and women’s educational choices, their preferences for subjects and the reversing gap in secondary and tertiary education enrolment and attainment. Nevertheless, for many reasons this whole body of reflections and achievements suffers from alternate fortune in visibility and invisibility, hangs on cultural revivals and cultural removals, receives appreciations and dismissals both from the female and the male audience.