A woman entrepreneur in a man's world

Enterprise is a destiny. Manufacturing is a choice. The international dimension is a vocation. Community is both the starting point and the finishing line. Being a woman is a biological, cultural and social bomb, often defused and silenced, but always ready to explode and enliven the ganglions and recesses of a predominantly elderly and male-dominated society, an organism with a high risk of self-preservation and self-weariness.

Emma Marcegaglia - born in 1965 - is an exponent of the European industrial bourgeoisie generated by the grafting of national manufactures - in particular Italian, French and German - into the robust and mighty body of the West's last growth phase, the golden age of globalisation, which started in the early 1990s. Marcegaglia points out: 'Everything is changing at the speed of light. Europe is experiencing a number of fragilities. It is far from the great technological frontiers, which are to be found in North America and Asia, particularly China. But it remains the area of the world with the greatest manufacturing culture'.

Marcegaglia is a pure manufacturer in a West that has progressively taken space away from the factory and has now begun to realise the seriousness of this mistake. But, at the same time, she has experienced commitment in associations and in the big companies of the mixed economy. She knows the problem of being a woman. She knows well what it means to belong to a family of newly minted entrepreneurs, outside the traditional lineage of the regal families of Italian capitalism of the last one hundred and fifty years, who have dominated the twentieth century since the nineteenth century and who, then, in the end - even in these years - have chosen to turn themselves into investors, a socially acceptable expression that hides the abandonment of the logic of market manufacturing and the disappearance - in their mental universe of dividend-earners and shareholders always in search of a quick financial return - of the smell of the factory.

Marcegaglia has operated at the junction between private and public life, factories and representation, manufacturing and relations with institutions. She was the first woman president of Confindustria in Italy: she led the association in Viale dell'Astronomia from 2008 to 2012. She was the first woman president of the state within the state that is Eni, where she held the board of directors from 2014 to 2020. She was the first woman president of Business Europe, the network uniting the industrial associations of the Old Continent, which she led from 2013 to 2017.

He has, therefore, direct, almost tactile experience of the technical ars that preside over the physiology of power and responsibility: 'For me it was very important to be president of the Young Entrepreneurs of Confindustria, from 1996 to 2000. In daily life and in the management of the organisational machine. In the confrontation with the doyens of industry and representation who, at the time, dominated Viale dell'Astronomia. I learnt the patience of listening and got into the habit of speaking last. In the end, what counts in the room is what a voice says, not the gender to which the speaker belongs'.