Female employment is rising, driven by women over 50 in the workforce

In Veneto, where the employment rate among very young female workers (aged 15–24) is higher than the Italian average (20.1 per cent compared with 14.4 per cent), the number of female workers per 100 female residents rose by 1.2% overall over the three-year period, whilst the employment rate for the youngest women fell by 2.4%.

Despite the improvements made in recent years, Italia’s figures on female employment remain far behind those of other European countries. The average female employment rate in the EU is 66.6 per cent, with figures ranging from 78.9 per cent in the Netherlands to 66.7 per cent in France. Even Greece and Romania have achieved higher female employment rates than Italia (Eurostat data, 2025).

In Italia, there are 18.8 million women of working age (15–64 years). Of these, over 10 million are in employment, almost 600,000 are unemployed, meaning they are not working but are looking for a job, whilst 7.8 million are economically inactive, meaning they are neither working nor looking for work, because they are still studying, are already retired or have family commitments they consider incompatible with employment.

The number of economically inactive women exceeds one million in Campania and Lombardy , followed by Sicily (918,000), Lazio (725,000), Puglia (699,000) and Tuscany (511,000). INAPP has analysed the composition of this group in detail (in the working paper ‘Unsustainable inactivity. The missing women’s labour force in Italia’s demographic transition’): just over half of economically inactive women have a low level of educational attainment, but women with university degrees and postgraduate qualifications account for 9.2 per cent on average (over 10 per cent in Liguria, Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany, and 11 per cent in Umbria, Marche and Lazio).

INAPP notes that 1.26 million women among the economically inactive would be willing to work. Of these, 18 per cent are undertaking study or training programmes – and therefore plan to work in the future – but 27 per cent attribute their inactivity to to family needs, either through directly caring for children or dependants, or because they fulfil a key role within the household.

This latter reason also applies to 27.4 per cent of the more than six million economically inactive women who state that they are not available for work. And for both groups (both economically inactive women available for work and those not available), caring for family members is cited as a significant reason from the age of 25, before becoming more prevalent between the ages of 30 and 40. In this age group, caring for family members is cited as the reason for not entering the labour market by around 60 per cent of the total.

According to Valentina Cardinali, head of the INAPP research group on the assessment of the gender impact of public policies, “within the demographic transition Italia is currently undergoing, the role of care is set to become more complex. Women in the age group known as the ‘sandwich generation’, due to the simultaneous need to manage multiple care responsibilities, including those for children and elderly relatives. For this reason – she adds – it will be essential not only to invest in recruitment incentives or in upskilling policies for women, but also to invest in the provision of adequate and accessible local services that can ensure the replacement the care role which is currently entrusted mainly to them. This shift – Cardinali continues – could open up significant opportunities for economic development, namely by creating jobs within the wider care sector. In other words, it is not enough to provide families with financial support such as the carer’s allowance for elderly people who are not self-sufficient, because in this way – she concludes – the burden of care still falls, above all, on women’.

Another crucial factor is the adequacy of wages , to ensure that women can reach the so-called ‘reserve wage’ – that is, the minimum wage threshold below which work is not considered acceptable or worthwhile as a means of returning to the labour market.