Smriti and Francesca in Washington to Discuss Gender Equality

The papers by Smriti Ganapathi, student of Economic and Social Sciences, and Francesca Rosso, Law student, have recently been published on the website of UN Women, the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women. "Everything started with an initiative of the Bocconi Dondena Research Centre in collaboration with UN Women", explains Paola Profeta, Professor who coordinates the initiative. The two students were invited last April to present their researches, conducted on the new Gender Equality Constitutional Database (GECD), in Washington, on the occasion of the UN Women International Symposium on Gender, Law and Constitutions (event they attended thanks to the contribution of Friend of Bocconi Inc.)

"Their participation in the conference and the publication of their research means that, through the initiative, we achieved an important academic as well as social goal: to promote knowledge and research on gender-based violence, which is unfortunately still a serious global problem," continues Profeta. "Our research was taken seriously by people of high stature in academia and policy-making and that convinced me that my work and my efforts can actually make a difference", says Smriti, whose paper, Tackling Violence Against Women: Can laws change perceptions?, looks into whether laws against gender-based violence are capable of changing public attitudes.

Francesca's paper, Tackling Gender-Based Discrimination and Gender-Based Violence. A comparative perspective between Europe and Africa, is a comparative study between the African and European constitutional laws on women's rights. African Constitutions include many more explicit references to women's rights, while the European framework contains more general principles of equality. In African countries, however, the idea of equal rights is much less deeply rooted, which is perhaps why there is a tendency not to leave anything in implicit form. "Hence, I have formulated the idea of a need to supplement laws with a more active role from individual States themselves, in order to raise awareness of gender equality issues using a bottom-up approach," explains the student. "In addition to the satisfaction of seeing my paper published, I will always remember the amazing conference I attended: I expected the classic seminar, instead I found myself actively taking part in round tables where ideas were shared and where everyone worked together to find useful ideas, all with the same noble goal".