What we have learned about gender and race stereotypes at work
GRASE - Gender and Race Stereotypes Eradication in labour market access is a 2-year EU funded project under the EU’s rights, equality and citizenship programme, focusing on facilitating the access of women with a migratory background to the labour market by reducing barriers in the career service's system.
Together with the lead partner Fondazione ISMU, Fondazione Giacomo Brodolini is ensuring the scientific quality and coherence of the project by providing the overall scientific supervision of the project phases and producing the scientific results based on its research activities.
In this first year of activities, GRASE implemented and developed Community of Practices (COPs) composed by career counselling professionals, as spaces of reflection where their knowledge and skills were mobilized in order to identify race and gender stereotypes in their work.
Over the last six months, the Italian Community of Practice identified five main "nodes" representing potential obstacles that, on the one hand, migrant women may have to face and, on the other, could generate stereotypical thoughts and actions in the professionals of career counselling services.
The Spanish Community of Practice has focused on the figure of the job counsellor, holding a central position and a vantage point in providing support to migrant women, especially in relation to very different environments (personal, family, legal, social and work).
The Portuguese Community of Practices has pointed out five main points, which are interconnected: access to information, clear language, self-assessment tools, training, cooperation between institutions. Highlighting how neither the guidance professionals nor the migrant women have access to clear and objective information; the use of opaque language is a major barrier for migrant women to know their rights and how and where to claim them; professionals do not have access to clear and objective information which would help them to improve their performance.
Moreover, GRASE research activities are providing solid empirical knowledge for understanding the intersectional discrimination - reproduced also by digital job placement platforms - experienced by women with migrant backgrounds in accessing the labour markets as well as the gender gap existing in international databases and surveys.
