With the Occupational Health and Safety Act (Legislative Decree 81/2008) Italy recognizes the gender as a relevant difference to ensure the equal protection for men and women at work. In the four years of the operation of this decree, we can detect a self-evident difficulty to translate this instruction into practice. Due to this delay, the Regional Directorate INAIL of Tuscany, to prevent that this part of the rule, related with the gender prevision, remain a dead letter, has promoted a research path on this subject. Within this framework, the paper aims, through the comparison with the literature and a coherent definition of the key concepts of the Legislative Decree, to provide a useful recommendation for a research design that should be both, theoretically aware and empirically oriented, in view of the translation of the Occupational Health and Safety Act into consistent guidelines.
Keywords: Genere, salute, valutazione dei rischi, tutela della salute sul lavoro, differenze, disuguaglianze