Lieu : université de Naples
Date : 8-10 octobre 2026
Date limite pour soumettre une proposition : 15 décembre 2025
Economic violence is both a mechanism and a manifestation of gender-based violence. Whether acting alone or combined with other forms of discrimination and abuse, it contributes to the exercise of male power and control within patriarchal systems and relationships, by constraining women’s independence and their economic and financial autonomy.
Current global data on gender disparities are striking. The Global Gender Gap Index published by the World Economic Forum in 2025—whose first of its four indicators is “Economic Participation and Opportunity”—shows that the gender gap in this area stands at 61%, making it, together with political participation, the most significant. Despite a reduction of the gap (from 55.1% in 2006 to the current 60.7%), women represent only 41.2% of the labour force and hold merely 29% of managerial positions (WEF GGGR 2025). Moreover, while 51% of global economies (98 out of 190) have adopted laws on equal pay, only 35 have introduced concrete implementation measures (World Bank 2024).
Global economic transformations, even after the pandemic, and the current inflationary pressures disproportionately affect women, due to their structural vulnerability across different geographical and socio-political contexts—both in the Global North and South.
Italy ranks 85th out of 148 countries in the overall Global Gender Gap Index (35th out of 40 in Europe), but 117th for the economic indicator (WEF GGGR 2025, pp. 223–224). Data from the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE) reveal a greater fragility of Italian women compared to their male counterparts in both the work and money dimensions of the Gender Equality Index—that is, lower participation in the labour market, lower income levels, and higher exposure to poverty risks, both in absolute terms and relative to the European average (EIGE 2024).
The report Financial Literacy and Economic Violence, presented to the Italian Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry on Feminicide and All Forms of Gender-Based Violence on 4 October 2024, confirms these trends and details the factors that exacerbate such inequalities (Bank of Italy 2024).
The report Financial Literacy and Economic Violence, presented to the Italian Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry on Feminicide and All Forms of Gender-Based Violence on 4 October 2024, confirms these trends and details the factors that exacerbate such inequalities (Bank of Italy 2024).
Economic violence both arises from and reinforces this structural context. Unsurprisingly, the 2024 Report on Gender Equality in the European Union highlights the issue of gender-based violence and harassment in the workplace, recalling the Council of Europe’s invitation to member states to ratify the Violence and Harassment Convention (ILO Convention 190) (EU Commission 2024).
However, the issue extends much further. EIGE underlines the limited visibility of economic violence compared to more explicit forms of abuse, as well as the lack of comprehensive data. The 2021 EUROSTAT estimate—that 8% of women aged 18–74 in thirty European countries have experienced economic violence—likely represents only the tip of the iceberg (EUROSTAT 2021). At the same time, EIGE reports that where gender gaps are narrower, behaviours associated with economic violence are less socially tolerated (EIGE 2024, p.55).
Data from Italian anti-violence centres show that women’s economic dependence on their partners often prevents or delays them from leaving abusive relationships. Furthermore, analysis of applications for the Freedom Income (Reddito di libertà, introduced in 2020 for women assisted by such centres) provides useful insight into the scope and characteristics of gender-based violence and the role played by economic vulnerability (P. Biasi, B. Ceremigna, M. De Paola, “Violenza di genere e indipendenza economica,” Il Mulino). Recent studies identify additional risk factors that expose women to economic violence or heighten its intensity: the unequal burden of family care, the presence of dependent children, and the positive impact of higher education (F. D’Agostino, G. Zacchia, M. Corsi, “Risk of Economic Violence: A New Quantification,” International Journal of Financial Studies, 2024, 12:82, DOI).
Historical research on family, labour, economy, and gender violence has long provided valuable tools for contextualizing and problematizing present-day data. For example, a recent issue of Genesis. Rivista della Società Italiana delle Storiche (A. Bellavitis, M. Martinat, eds., Disuguaglianze. Il valore delle donne, 2, 2022) shows how gender perspectives have remained paradoxically marginal in the study of equality/inequality, and offers essays that, by integrating economic with social dimensions, reveal the persistence of gender asymmetries. Similarly, an international conference on Genre et Argent (Anaïs Albert, Christopher Fletcher, Julie Marfany, Marianne Thiven, Valentina Toneatto, eds.) emphasized that the relationship between women and money remains underexplored: the handling and control of money—its use as a tool of domination or empowerment, its ownership and management—have rarely been treated as independent historical problems. Sociologists and anthropologists remind us that “money” encompasses but also transcends “currency,” acquiring meaning within social contexts and systems of affect, value, custom, and belief. Thus, money becomes a powerful lens through which to reveal gender norms and social relations. This is well demonstrated by Céline Bessières and Sybille Gollac’s Le genre du capital. Comment la famille reproduit les inégalités (Paris, 2020), which investigates how intra-family distribution of wealth in twentieth-century France continues to reproduce gender inequality.
Beyond Europe, both past and present, multiple forms of control and deprivation have shaped gendered divisions of labour and posed major obstacles to women’s social, political, legal, and religious rights. Corresponding to these obstacles are diverse strategies, discourses, and practices of gender justice that, while rooted in specific contexts, offer a dynamic transnational field for analysing claims, language, and emancipatory possibilities.
Inequality, in terms of both research approaches and historical phenomena, invites us to adopt gender violence as an integrated and revealing lens—one that captures broad structural processes while offering a fertile methodological tool.
Considering these reflections, the Gender History Research Centre of the University of Naples “L’Orientale” is organizing a conference dedicated to the history of economic violence—forms of domination, surveillance, exploitation, and gendered economic sabotage within family and private relations, in workplaces, and in institutional contexts.
The conference aims to:
- Provide a long-term analytical perspective
- Highlight diverse historical and geographical contexts
- Develop classical and feminist theoretical approaches
- Present case studies drawn from historical sources
- Promote comparative viewpoints.
The historical approach will be privileged to question linear narratives of “modernization” and to complicate our reading of the present.
Suggested Themes
- Control and appropriation of resources; women’s property and economic rights; exclusion from decision-making; coercion into financial obligations; denial of economic support.
- Legal and cultural barriers to using or accessing money, credit, or savings; restrictions on consumption and spending autonomy.
- Sabotage of women’s economic independence and careers.
- Legal exclusion or social inhibition from professions; feminization of trades and resulting devaluation; wage and maternity inequalities.
- Invisibility of women’s labour and income in historical sources.
- Gender differences in economic literacy and access to financial information.
- Conflicts between paid work or study and domestic care responsibilities.
- Sexual harassment and coercion in the workplace.
- Intersections of gendered economic experience with migration and other vulnerabilities.
- Gender stereotypes concerning financial competence or occupational suitability.
- Individual and collective (feminist) resistance to exploitation; forms of cooperation and mutual support.
- Institutional responses to economic violence.
- Women’s relationship to labour, production, and money in classical and feminist economic thought.
Submission Guidelines
Proposals (in Italian or English) must be sent by 15 December 2025 to
📧 centrogenderhistory@unior.it
Please include:
- Title
- Abstract (max. 1,500 characters, spaces included)
- Short bio/CV
Notification of acceptance will be sent by 30 January 2026 after review by the scientific committee.
The conference will take place in person only in Naples.
No participation fee is required. Travel and accommodation costs are to be borne by participants. If funding or scholarships become available, details will be announced through a separate call.
Scientific Committee
Simona Feci (University of Naples “L’Orientale” – coordinator),
Paola Avallone (CNR-ISEM),
Vincenzo Bavaro (University of Naples “L’Orientale”),
Anna Bellavitis (Université de Rouen),
Sara Borrillo (University of Naples “L’Orientale”),
Maria Rosaria De Rosa (University Suor Orsola Benincasa),
Ida Fazio (University of Palermo),
Vittoria Fiorelli (University Suor Orsola Benincasa),
Alessandra Gissi (University of Naples “L’Orientale”),Marzia Mauriello (University of Naples “L’Orientale”),
Lea Nocera (University of Naples “L’Orientale”),
Raffaella Salvemini (CNR-ISEM),
Domenico Rizzo (University of Naples “L’Orientale”),
Antonella Sannino (University of Naples “L’Orientale”).