Female employment in Italy: cultural and infrastructural challenge. The numbers
The Italian gender gap is among the highest in Europe, with many women forced into part-time work for family reasons
by Lab24
3' min read
3' min read
Recent months have seen new employment records in Italy. The unemployment rate has also reached its lowest level in the last twenty years and, as Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni pointed out in a post on 8 March, 'female employment has reached its highest level ever'. However, behind these positive signs lies a much more complex reality for Italian female workers. Our country continues to occupy the last positions in Europe in terms of female participation in the labour market. One figure above all: in 2024, only 53% of Italian women between the ages of 15 and 64 will be employed, against an EU average of 66%. Worse than us, none among the member states. Even candidate countries for accession to the Union, such as Serbia, do better.
Not only are we (far) behind the rest of Europe, but we are also improving more slowly: over the last fifteen years, the female employment rate has increased by 6 percentage points compared to an average increase of 9 points in the EU. The gap is even more marked in the South, where only 37% of women of working age are in work. The result is one of the widest gender gaps in Europe: in Italy, on average, the percentage of men in employment exceeds that of women by a full 19 percentage points, a figure second only to Greece.
Women who work do so for fewer hours. In 2024, employed women in Italy were paid on average 15% fewer hours per month than men. Among the main reasons is the wider use of part-time working arrangements. Three million women work part-time, compared to one million men. It is often not a choice. The unequal distribution of family responsibilities is the main factor behind this difference. More than 35% of women's part-time work in Italy is due to family reasons or care for children or frail relatives. Reasons that drive only 5% of their male counterparts to part-time work. The difficult reconciliation of work and family life still leads many women to leave their jobs or reduce the number of hours worked. Not surprisingly, the employment rate of mothers living in couples is 12 percentage points lower than that of single women without children. Among other causes braking female labour market participation, Banca d'Italia cites the choice of schooling paths associated with lower returns in terms of employment.
On the one hand, there is a greater propensity for women to pursue a tertiary degree. At the same time, however, female students prefer humanities rather than STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) subjects.
In Italy, the percentage of women aged 25-34 with a degree in these disciplines is in fact less than half that of men (16% vs. 37%).
