Discriminazioni di genere. Il ruolo delle istituzioni

This essay examines the relationship between gender discrimination and institutions, acknowledging the inherent duality of the latter: for a very long time institutions and the law produced and legitimised the exclusion of women, and only later, mainly from the second half of the twentieth century onwards, did they become vehicles for the promotion of equality. Within this framework, the article focuses on a form of discrimination that remains under-explored from a gender perspective: institutional discrimination, which operates impersonally through rules, regulations, procedures and practices, and whose insidiousness lies in the perceptual inversion it produces in those who experience it. The article examines its “intersectional” manifestations in access to public services and argues that countering it requires a constant exercise of institutional self-reflexivity, together with a multilevel approach combining legislative, educational, symbolic and experimental dimensions. No legal instrument, it is finally argued, can prove effective without an osmosis between institutions and the demands arising from civil society and rights advocacy movements.