MYPEOPLE builds on the PO.TE.RO project (“POvertà nei territori della Toscana: quali stratEgie di inteRventO” POR FSE 2014/20 – Asse C), financed by Regione Toscana. This project conducted two probability-based sample surveys to examine the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic (2021 survey), the war in Ukraine, the energy crisis, and rising inflation (2022 survey) on economic poverty and vulnerability at a sub-regional level. The successful implementation of the PO.TE.RO project in Tuscany provides a robust foundation to share and replicate this experience in other regions.

The current project considers the diversity in quality and conditions of life across various regions. Therefore, the MYPEOPLE project involves three key regions from the North, Center, and South of Italy: Lombardy, Tuscany, and Campania.

The general objective of MYPEOPLE is collect data and results valuable for stakeholders and policymakers, enabling them to plan more targeted actions aimed at reducing social inequalities in the three regions under study.

The project benefit from an interdisciplinary and complementary team, characterized by:
- A multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approach: Experts from statistics, economics, and sociology will collaborate, sharing ideas and discussing results across different themes within the work program.

- Integration of analytical techniques: The project will employ a variety of techniques, including statistical-econometric analysis, small-area estimation, and microsimulation modelling. The team's diverse backgrounds in quantitative methods ensure highly complementary approaches.

These interactions will facilitate the development of a new method for surveying life conditions from a multidimensional perspective, producing credible and harmonized data across regions. This will enable the establishment of best practices that can be replicated and refined in future projects.

The project will advance the development of sophisticated tools for assessing spatial and multidimensional poverty and inequality, essential for understanding these issues and designing effective mitigation strategies at the local level.

The innovative empirical analysis of Italian households’ well-being will enhance our understanding of existing inequalities among different population groups (e.g., gender, age). This analysis will serve as a foundation for crafting effective socio-economic policies with a focus on local impacts.

Key innovations of the project include:

1) Comprehensive measurement approaches: The project will employ a variety of measures to assess well-being at the local level. In addition to traditional monetary indicators, it will use multidimensional and fuzzy measures that cover aspects such as employment, education, health, and housing, providing a more holistic view of vulnerability.

2) Development of composite indicators: The project will introduce innovative composite indicators of multidimensional poverty and inequality. This includes comprehensive indicators that account for spatial dependencies across Italian territories, and the use of Bayesian networks to address limitations in existing poverty measures by reflecting interrelations among dimensions.

3) Tax-Benefit microsimulation: Application of a tax-benefit microsimulation approach to evaluate, ex-ante, the impact of policies on individual and household well-being. This method, commonly used at the international and national levels, will be adapted for regional and local contexts, integrating details of regional policies to explore policy heterogeneity and propose original solutions by swapping instruments across regions.

Overall, the project is highly interdisciplinary, combining strong statistical and econometric expertise with economic analysis at both macro and micro levels. It will utilize a diverse range of data sources at individual, local, regional, and national levels, analyzed with advanced and innovative statistical techniques.

Work Packages

WP1 – Data Management

The aims of WP1 concern:

• managing the owned data and their continuous updates coming from the agreement with the MUR;
• finalising their integration to build databases that allow the longitudinal analysis of students' educational and professional experiences.

Moreover, since ANS-AlmaLaurea integration is of interest to many Italian universities, it is expected that they will share their AlmaLaurea data with the RUs of SHE WINS and thus contribute to enlarging the database.

In summary, there will be the following three milestones:

• MS1.1) Deterministic linkage of INVALSI and ANS microdata for longitudinal analyses
• MS1.2) Probabilistic linkage of ANS and AlmaLaurea microdata for longitudinal analyses
• MS1.3) Integration of INVALSI, ANS and Almalaurea microdata for achieving longitudinal student/graduate/worker biographies (only if INVALSI microdata will be available at least for the 2015 cohort)

WP2 - STEM Gender Gap in Education

One of the main goals of the SHE WINS Project regards the focus on the gender gap in STEM degree courses in Italy. The analysis will cover the different aspects outlined in SG1, SG2, and SG3, i.e. enrolment rates, drop-out rates, and performance in STEM degrees. In addition, a possible focus should be analysing the COVID period effect on students' choices at enrolment in HE. We will follow two interrelated approaches: that one based on indicators and the model-based one. Finding suitable measures for the investigated domains is very challenging and essential for the WP4. The overall analysis and the web-based platform require summary measures that can highlight different aspects of the gender gap in STEM. The analysis based on statistical models is helpful as it can highlight the possible determinants of the observed behaviours, especially regarding the gender gap topic. In fact, the available data allows monitoring and studying the aspects of the three SGs mentioned above and considering context information such as family social status, university experience, and high school educational background. They are all aspects that can determine choices and success at university. The Leading Unit will be the University of Siena due to the research experience of its members.

In summary, there will be the following three milestones:

• MS2.1) Descriptive analysis of the STEM-HE gender gap in a longitudinal perspective
• MS2.2) Estimation of statistical models for studying the determinants of the STEM-HE using a multidimensional and longitudinal perspective
• MS2.3) Definition of different types of indicators for measuring the intersectionality between gender and STEM in HE

WP3 – STEM Gender Gap in Employment

The second main goal is to investigate the gender gap for STEM graduates in the job market, with a particular focus on wages and job status. This aspect is really linked to the previous one because information about graduates' experience at university and their background can be helpful for such a goal. Therefore, WP2 and WP3, even though they are separate, have many contact points and opportunities for analysis and reflection. Also in this case, different statistical approaches will be followed to reach (summary) measures of the investigated domains and highlight possible factors linked to the gender gap. These results are also helpful for the WP4. The Leading Unit will be the University of Palermo, as it has already gained experience experimenting with the linkage of ANS+AlmaLaurea data on its graduates and has already started studying the topic.

In summary, there will be these three milestones:

• MS3.1) Descriptive analysis of STEM-labour market gender gap in a longitudinal perspective
• MS3.2) Estimation of statistical models for studying determinants of the gender gap in STEM labour market outcomes
• MS3.3) Definition of different types of indicators for measuring the intersectionality between gender and STEM in the labour market

WP4 - Web-based dashboard and research dissemination

Finally, WP4 is the natural expression and conclusion of the SHE WINS Project. Studies and analyses cannot have a tangible impact if they are not shared. Therefore, the creation of a web platform to consult measures and maps for monitoring aspects of the gender gap in STEM is, in our opinion, essential. This web platform will be developed in HTML JAVA script and PHB environment, with the contribution of an external consultant. We will ensure that it will be maintained, updated, and improved until the end of the Project. After its end, the prototype will still be accessible and useable.

One aspect to be stressed here concerns the work of the RUs for choosing the most relevant measures to be included in the platform, in which way to make them accessible, respecting privacy rules, and how to depict them graphically. Therefore, during this phase, the research units will discuss and reflect in-depth on identifying appropriate information and developing indicators to better communicate with the platform's users (as mentioned in WP3 and WP4).

In addition to the specific four WPs, the SHE WINS Project includes a dedicated public website to store the Project's information (e.g., objectives, Working Packages, members, and achieved goals).

Finally, the research results will be spread and also shared through scientific publications in international journals and conference communications.

In summary, there will be these four milestones:

• MS4.1) Creation of the website for SHE WINS Project
• MS4.2) Result dissemination
• MS4.3) Design of the Dashboard prototype on the STEM gender gap
• MS4.4) Implementation of the Dashboard prototype on the STEM gender gap