Le donne nei processi di integrazione. I risultati della ricerca in Italia

In different contexts of immigration and in different stages of international migration movements, women proved to play their own specific role that led, even in Italy, to the development of a specific field of empirical and theoretical inquiry and to the production of a huge amount of literature, that, nevertheless, remains mainly chaotic. In particular, what has not been sufficiently focused upon is the fact that each stage of the so called process of integration, as well as each indicator that provides the key for the reading of the processes, has its own originality and autonomy when viewed from the gender standpoint: Starting from this fact, the literature on female immigration that has been accumulated in the last years will be studied in order to answer the following questions: are there significant differences between women and men in the process of integration, namely, in everything that involves the process of entry, the relation with society as a whole, and the inclusion within the different levels of social structure? In other words, is integration in the field of employment different for women than it is for men? Do the demands and uses of social services, the intra- and inter-community relations, show significant differences between the genders? To what extent are redefinition of identity, negotiation between the culture of origin and the new life-style, and educational patterns proposed to second generations readable from the gender point of view? The aim of this essay, therefore, is to reconstruct the state of the art for what concerns the principal theoretical and empirical results on integration processes of immigrant women in Italy and to attempt to provide an answer to the above questions.