Gender Equality Plan and healthcare: a case study on gender policies in a hospital setting

Abstract

With the Framework Programme “Horizon Europe”, the European Commission introduced Gender Equality Plans as an eligibility criterion for all research per-forming organizations, including hospitals engaged in scientific research. For the European Commission, GEPs make it possible to concretise the institutional change involving policies, norms, organisational processes and practices that have an impact on gender equality, in the perspective of the strategy known as gender mainstreaming. This paper intends to analyse the approval process of a Gender Equality Plan in a research hospital context, through the presentation of the case study of the IRCCS Ospedale Policlinico San Martino in Genoa, Italy. The paper intends to investigate not only the approval process of the document but also the resistances and criticalities encountered, together with the discrepancies that emerged between diagnosis and prognosis, highlighting the po-litical processes of negotiation, compromise and re-signification of gender equality in an institutional context.

Keywords: Gender Equality Plan, gender policies, healthcare, gender in hospitals, gender mainstreaming.