25 May 2026
Palazzo Strozzi, Aula Pollaiolo

h 10-12

Speakers: Professor Gill Allwood (Nottingham Trent University) and Professor Francesca Scrinzi (University of Glasgow)

EU Climate Policy through a Gender Lens
Gill Allwood, Nottingham Trent University

Climate change was for a long time framed as a scientific problem to be solved through scientific and technological means. Gender was not perceived to be relevant either to the problem or the solution and has only recently begun to be integrated into international climate policy, largely as a result of civil society advocacy.

Gender is, however, once against under threat in many parts of the world, and a discourse of crisis – whether financial, climate and/or security – sees gender equality frequently framed as an unaffordable luxury. Taking the EU as an example, this paper investigates the processes through which gender equality becomes excluded from climate policy making, the impact of its persistent neglect, and proposals for bringing about change at all stages of the policy process, from problem definition to implementation, monitoring and evaluation.

The gendered mainstreaming of populist radical right politics: embracing the neoliberal gender regime
Francesca Scrinzi, University of Glasgow

A growing literature points to the complex relationship existing between PRR (populist radical right) politics and gender, and highlights the role played by gender issues in the mainstreaming of nativist and populist ideas. These parties have been traditionally seen as male-dominated ‘men’s parties’, voted by a majority of male voters and espousing gender-conservative views. Yet, while PRR ideologies remain masculinist and heteronormative, in Western Europe the PRR attempts to ‘normalize’ its public image, succeeding in attracting growing numbers of women voters (Mayer 2022). Reflecting changing models of femininity/masculinity and expectations around gender, the PRR elaborates more pragmatic positions on the family and mobilizes issues of gender equality to target the racialized Others, depicting migrant men as misogynist and violent (Meret and Siim 2013). Based on a qualitative (biographical interviews with party members and representatives, observations, and Critical Frame Analysis applied to party documents) study, this paper analyses PRR gender ideology in the Rassemblement national (RN, France) and the Lega (Italy), showing how it has evolved over time, including in correspondence with leadership changes. The mainstreaming of PRR ideas was crucially sustained by racialized views of gender underpinning the discourse of various political actors beyond the PRR, including the conservative right. The paper then conceptualizes such developments in PRR gender ideology by locating them in the broader context of neoliberal globalization. The paper delineates how, in using gender to mainstream its ideas, the PRR has moved away from a more traditional familistic ideology and from supporting a ‘domestic gender regime’ to embracing the neoliberal ‘public gender regime’ (Walby 2009), and deploying a new ‘neoliberal feminist’ discourse centred on women’s freedoms.