7: Diversity Management from a Gender Perspective in the Private Sector: TIM and IKEA Case Studies^*

DM is considered an essential tool for enhancing diversity within organizations and is now a relevant practice in large companies both globally and in Italy (Buemi et al., 2015; Zanfrini & Monaci, 2014). Although the Italian context has welcomed this practice with a certain delay compared to realities such as North America and the United Kingdom, DM is quickly gaining relevance in our country as well (Zanfrini & Monaci, 2014).

In the United States, the first studies on DM emerged in the late 1980s, in response to an increasingly globalized context and to the growing need to interact with a more diverse range of stakeholders and customers. There is a general consensus that this phenomenon has been accelerated by the financialization of the economy, the crisis of the Taylorist–Fordist model and structural changes in the labor market, such as the increase in female participation, growth in the number of foreign workers and aging of the population. These factors have undoubtedly contributed to increasing the heterogeneity of the workforce, thereby obliging public-, private-, and third-sector organizations to deal with these transformations.