Smart Cities for Women: New Scenarios for Equal Opportunities. A Pedagogical Perspective

The aim of the paper is to tackle the connection between gender and technologies. This issue proves to be a pivotal point in the field of equal opportunities, though it has not been sufficiently analyzed and despite the fact that the issues of inequality and social segregation connected with it are relevant. A significant gap between the sexes has been highlighted by several studies on the relationship between women and new technologies. Some other studies, in suggesting an overcoming of dichotomies (including public-private, man-machine, male-female) that historically have been the basis of the greatest discrimination between the sexes and have conditioned the perception that women have of themselves, agree in arguing that ever since the computer era began, it has been from the beginning a culture and machinery elaborated by men for men. Even at the same degree of education, age and social condition, the digital divide emerged as a new expression of the traditional social-cultural model in Italy, resistant to changes and capable of relegating women to the margins of the country’s life. Conditioned on many fronts, Italian women have thus responded in a more limited way and with more difficulty to growing technological progress, precisely because the culture they live in has not prepared them to confront it. In particular, the less frequent use of computers by women is due to a sort of “inner prohibition”, which is the result of several cultural legacies that have always characterized the technological universe. Furthermore, recent Italian data agree with international literature in highlighting, even today, an approach to the digital world that is not "user-friendly" for women. In fact, the female presence within the scientific and professional pathways of the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) area is significantly lower than the male one. Therefore, in the second part, the contribution intends to present the first results of a research project which, using mixed methods (quantitative and qualitative) and based on the principles of critical feminist pedagogy, intends to identify among Neapolitan women the possible and different meanings of “gender approaches” to technological and social development in urban contexts.