Fermions and parity violation in dimensional reduction schemes

Dimensional reduction, previously applied to Yang-Mills theories, is extended to gauge theories with spinor fields. It is shown that a fairly realistic model in Minkowski space can be obtained from the simplest initial lagrangian, defined in a space-time with extra, compact dimensions. Left-right asymmetry in the fermion sector in four dimensions is possible, and its occurrence is related to a non-vanishing Atiyah-Singer index.