Does Social Innovation Reduce the Economic Marginalization of Women? Insights from the Case of Italian Solidarity Purchasing Groups

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the relationship between gender and social innovation to highlight the possible positive effects of women's participation in social innovation in terms of protection from economic marginalization. It focuses on Italian solidarity purchasing groups as a case of social innovation in the domain of food and agriculture. The analysis is based on logistic regression using primary data collected in 2016 for the EU funded project CrESSI. The results show that participation in social innovation does protect households from worsening economic conditions. However, it was not empirically proven that there is a significant difference between men and women in the benefit enjoyed from the participation in solidarity purchasing groups.

KEYWORDS:

• Marginalization
• gender
• social innovation
• solidarity purchasing groups
• alternative food networks

Acknowledgement

The author thanks Marco Gavazzoni for his precious comments on paragraph 5.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. This paper has been produced thanks to the support of the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme for Research, Technological Development and Demonstration (contract nr. 613261 – project CRESSI). The information and views set out in this article are those of the author', only and do not necessarily reflect the official opinion of the European Union.

2. Solidarity purchasing groups is the English term for ‘gruppi di acquisto solidale’, usually shortened to GAS, which is how participants usually call the groups. In this paper the acronym SPGs is used.

3. The dependent variable has 1427 valid cases (of which 576 beneficiary). The final absolute number of respondents in models is 1422 as some of the independent variables present in the models have different missing cases from the dependent variable.

4. Results of the models will be presented in tables with odds ratios, while marginal effects will be used while commenting results.

5. In this paper, the perspective of Bernardi, Chakhaia, and Leopold (2017) on the significance threshold is adopted with the aim of focusing on the substantive significance of the factors under analysis.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie [grant number 747433].