"There will be people who think our cities are already gender equal"
Chiara Bergonzini on gender in urban food policy
Editor’s note: Today’s SPOTLIGHT mini-series features a powerhouse voice in gender and food policy: Chiara Bergonzini. I first met Chiara at last year’s AESOP Sustainable Food Planning Group’s conference in Brussels, and we crossed paths again this June at their Young Academic Professionals meet-up in Montpellier.
Chiara is a fellow PhD researcher and food governance aficionado whose work parallels some of my own research. While I examined how urban food policies engage with immigrant foodways, Chiara explored how they integrate gender equality objectives. Urban food policies are a relatively new phenomenon, and although they often claim to advance sustainable food systems, their approach to social justice remains under-explored.
In today’s interview, Chiara breaks down what happens when gender isn’t explicitly considered in policy-making — and how that omission can reinforce inequalities.
- Isabela
Isabela: Chiara, it’s so great to have the chance to talk about your work in greater detail; I always love listening to your conference presentations! We’re both interested in urban food policy, and your work focuses specifically on gender. How did you become interested in this topic?
Chiara: It was quite organic. I was working for an independent research center in Milan that focuses on transforming urban food systems. In the meantime, I came across Milan Gender Atlas, a book mapping various services around the city through the lens of gender equality.
I was so impressed. It underlined some aspects of daily life that I had never realized had such a strong connection to gender differences. For example, they mapped all the public transportation routes that are inaccessible with a stroller and argued that this impacts women much more than men because they are still very much in charge of care duties.
I started to make an effort to apply a similar perspective to the work I was doing. This helped me “train” my point of view; once you internalize this perspective, you see everything through this lens. At the same time I realized this approach was almost completely lacking from the urban food systems transformation discourse I was examining at work.
At the time, I was already considering pursuing a PhD, and I decided to apply by proposing a project focusing on this topic so that I could focus more deeply on it.
Isabela: For a journal article you published as part of your PhD, you looked at 20 urban food policies to see how gender was integrated into municipal food planning. Can you explain to readers what these policies do, and how gender perspectives were (or were not) integrated?
Chiara: I selected 20 of the world’s most well-known and regarded international urban food policies. In general, these policies aim to transform urban food systems towards greater sustainability (environmental, social and economic), while also addressing issues specific to the city.
For context, there’s a lot of research out there on gender inequality in the food system. Consumption behaviours, for example, are influenced by gender norms, with consuming meat often perceived as masculine and consuming vegetables as feminine. Differences also exist in what jobs men and women tend to do in the food chain: agriculture is perceived as more masculine, while working in the restaurant sector is more feminine (except at the top level of famous chefs).
Despite these known inequalities, only two urban food policies of the 20 I looked at — Barcelona and Zaragoza, Spain — included an explicit intention to reduce gender differences. And while these policies highlighted data showing that the cities’ food systems were not gender equal, there were very few proposals for action.
The other 18 policies fell into two camps. Some did not even mention gender differences; this could be because gender-disaggregated data is often lacking, and as a result, they remain invisible. Others only mentioned women’s experience of food systems in connection to their role in feeding households. This ultimately reduces women’s experiences in food systems to motherhood, and focuses on what women can do for others, rather than recognizing their own experiences as consumers, producers, workers, and people.
Isabela: What are the risks of these kinds of gender-blind policies? On the other hand, what can gender-progressive policies do to transform gender relations?
Chiara: Research on gender-blind public policies shows that failing to actively address gender inequalities risks reinforcing them.1 My previous example of urban food policies only accounting for women’s experience of food systems in relation to their role as mothers is a good representation of this risk. Culturally and historically, women have been disproportionately responsible for the reproductive labour of feeding households. Because of this, targeting women with food education initiatives and supporting their food intake while pregnant has a positive impact on population health and food security.
However, the very fact that most of these tasks fall on their shoulders, even as women’s participation in the labour market has increased, is one of the main gender issues in food systems. It means that women have to dedicate much of their free time to tasks such as grocery shopping, cooking, and trying to offer balanced diets to their households. Consequently, decision-makers can end up blaming them for children having poor nutrition, and assume that they should take on the burden of the family needing to “eat better”.
Many of the policies I analyzed framed the role of women in household and child nutrition as essential, without challenging the discriminatory and unequal division of this labour. A lone counterexample is New York City’s food policy, which explicitly states that both parents are responsible for the nutrition of their children. I’d like to see far more policies seeking to transform norms around food-related labour, by calling for actions that support co-responsibility.
Most policies also failed to consider other issues that women face in the food system during times of their lives when they are neither pregnant nor caring for their children. Women, for example, have a higher risk of eating disorders than men, and tend to work in more precarious food service jobs, but these issues went unaddressed.
Isabela: In the urban food policies that did mention gender, was it only in relation to women, or were efforts made to include the LGBTQ2+ community?
Chiara: Often, when policies mentioned “gender” as a sort of checklist item to consider (but then failed to elaborate), they also mentioned other dimensions of identity, mostly age (for example with policies specific for seniors or children) and migratory background. I do not recall any mention to LGBTQIA+ communities — although it was not my research focus, so I might have missed it.
I think interpreting gender differences in the limited sense of differences between women and men is often the first step towards a broader view that includes queer identities and sexualities. If anyone were to re-analyze these policies now through an LGBTQ2+ lens, I imagine you wouldn’t find much — these institutions just aren’t there yet. And in general, gender-disaggregated data collection techniques often overlook these nuances.
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Isabela: After doing your broader policy analysis, your research honed in on two specific case study cities, Milan and Barcelona, based on the fact that Milan’s policy was gender-blind and Barcelona’s had a gender equality-related objective. I understood you spoke to policy-makers in each city to understand if and how these policy differences played out on the ground. What did you find?
Chiara: Indeed, the City of Barcelona’s food policy lists “gender inequality” among the main challenges that must be tackled in Barcelona’s food system. Throughout the policy document, it includes other, more explicit goals, such as encouraging women’s participation in decision-making spaces related to the food policy and fostering female entrepreneurship in agroecological projects.
However, when it came to the policy’s impact, I did not find many differences related to the fact that Barcelona’s food policy had these gender-related goals. The policymakers I interviewed in Barcelona admitted that it has become somewhat expected to integrate a gender equality goal into public policies in Spain — but actually implementing it is another story. At least as of when I did my fieldwork in 2024, a strategy to implement these goals was lacking.
This could be considered as a spoiler of my PhD thesis that I am currently writing, but the most transformative actions in both cities tend to be the most grassroots — alternative food networks, including consumer groups, urban gardens, and agroecological cooperatives. These networks come into direct contact with communities, so they’re able to detect gender inequalities through experience, rather than because it is asked in a policy. For example, interviewees from several food aid distribution projects told me that most of the people who go to collect the food boxes are women, many of them immigrants. This observation suggests the need for intersectional programming that considers both reproductive labour and potential barriers that immigrants face to food access.
Since grassroots actors are well-positioned to identify these issues and trends, food policy actors should ensure there is space to dialogue with them, and seek to provide them with financial and logistical support wherever possible.
Isabela: You’ve clearly gleaned a ton of information from your analysis, and I heard that you’re now working on an analytical framework to account for gender in urban food systems change. What does this framework look like, and how do you hope it will be used?
Chiara: While doing my first gender analysis of urban food policies, I realized I did not know exactly what to look for or how to assess whether each policy integrated attention to gender in a comprehensive way. This is because no officially recognized framework lists all the elements that a policy should address to be fully gender-attentive.
In a recent academic article published with Francesca Donati, I did a deep-dive into Zaragoza, Barcelona and Valencia’s policies, as these are two that propose educational actions to raise awareness about gender equality. We created a framework based on what we found. It includes six main categories of gender discrimination: 1) access to assets, 2) access to agricultural markets, 3) access to technology and knowledge, 4) exposure to risks and resilience, 5) representation in decision-making, and 6) the division of reproductive labour.
Together, these cover all scales from global to local (and even the micro-scale of the household). We hope that people will use this framework to assess whether policies address each category of potential gender discrimination, and to identify policy areas that require special attention in terms of gender equality.
Isabela: Let’s zoom out a bit. I’m interested in how to navigate the tricky tensions that sometimes come up when doing fieldwork as a young researcher. Your presentation for AESOP, you mentioned that you struggled in some cases with pushback from interviewees who disagreed with the importance of gender mainstreaming in urban food policy. How did you navigate with this?
Chiara: When it comes to gender equality, unfortunately, many people are biased. There will be people — and I encountered them — who think that our cities are already gender-equal, or who dismiss the need for gender perspectives because the general perception is that food is available to women in Milan and Barcelona. I would always come to my interviews prepared with examples from the data demonstrating gender inequality in the food system, as a way of evidencing the importance of the research when people might discredit it. Doing this with data, rather than expressing my own personal views, made these issues harder to contest.
I also came across people who had simply never thought about gender differences in their own experience as actors in food systems transformation. However, this did not always mean that they disagreed with the premise. While some interviewees admitted to having never thought about it, they also expressed interest in applying this perspective in their work, and asked me for suggestions or examples of good practices to follow. In this way, the interviews also felt like a chance to spread the word among practitioners about gender differences in the food system — which to me is equally as important as my academic outputs.
Isabela: Speaking of gathering people’s personal views, in your presentation for AESOP, you mention how urban food policies are (at least partially) created by conducting participatory dialogues with residents. How representative are these dialogues of the general population? What influences the demographics of who participates?
Chiara: Food policies often involve participatory drafting processes — that is to say, processes that invite city residents to give input on food policy issues and solutions. However, the policy-makers and civil society representatives I spoke to all agreed that ensuring effective and meaningful citizen participation is very difficult, even if the organizations involved have good intentions.
Firstly, participating in policy development as a city resident requires investing one’s personal time and effort. For working people with inflexible schedules, or people who are also responsible for reproductive labour on top of their “regular” jobs, this means it may not be possible to engage. Also, these formal policy spaces can be intimidating for people who are’t used to them, particularly when there are technical background documents involved. Unless a targeted effort is made to include often-marginalized groups like youth, immigrants, and racialized communities, they may not have their voices heard.
Secondly, gender norms also influence participation. The topic of sustainable food systems is highly feminized; in the participatory process for Barcelona’s food policy, almost 80% of the 1,000 participants were women, reinforcing the potential for sustainable food systems change to add to the expectation that women shoulder responsibility for eating better and differently.
Finally, because participation requires people to dedicate their free time, facilitators often try to keep participatory sessions short. While this hopefully translates to making sessions more accessible, it means that they are often managed in a top-down, structured way, which can make it hard for everyone to feel heard or to deliberate ideas at length.
Isabela: You’re almost done with your PhD. What’s next for you?
Chiara: I hope to continue working in food systems research, spreading awareness about the importance of integrating gender into food policy, and further integrating an intersectional lens. My research has taught me that gender inequality is “never pure” (an expression I picked up from a 2020 report on gender in food systems; see pg.6). Most differences and inequalities that I encountered were based on gender, but also other characteristics, such as level of education, origin, socioeconomic situation, age…so yes, gender is a very influential variable, but it works with other dynamics, too, and I want to hone in on how these interact.
Isabela: Where can readers learn more about your work?
Chiara: My Google Scholar is usually up-to-date, but some of my papers are unfortunately not open access (this raises a whole other conversation about equality and power!). If anyone would like a copy, they can contact me on LinkedIn.
Chiara Bergonzini is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Sociology and Social Research of the University of Milan-Bicocca. Her research focuses on urban food governance and its potential in creating gender-just urban food systems, with case studies in Milan and Barcelona. She spent a visiting period at the University of Vic – Central University of Catalunya and at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, and she also collaborates with the independent research center EStà, located in Milan and specialized in sustainable urban food systems. Since May 2025, she has been the coordinator of the working table “Gender and food systems” of the Italian network for local food policies.
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This dynamic doesn’t necessarily or always end up disfavouring women: for example, projects aimed at socialization through food (e.g. cooking workshops) aimed at people with weak social networks — such as elderly people or newly-arrived migrants — have been found to be much more effective on women than men. This is why I mostly refer to “gender differences” rather than “gender inequality”, even though in most cases it is women who are disenfranchised by the lack of gender mainstreaming.