Ten years of Alley Oop

Italia

From maternity to retirement: how the system penalises women's work

The INPS report shows strong imbalances: female employment at 53.3%, wage gap over 25% and pensions up to 46% lower

by Azzurra Rinaldi

4 March 2026

2' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

Key points

Shortage of services
Salary gap
The power system

2' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

In Italia, power continues to resemble an exclusive club for men. This is certified not by an ideological assessment, but by the numbers of the INPS Gender Report, which photograph an economic and social system that is still profoundly unbalanced.

The first indicator is the labour market. The female employment rate stands at 53.3%, compared to 71.1% for men. A gap of almost 18 percentage points that places Italia firmly at the bottom of the European rankings. Even more significant is the figure on inactivity: over 42% of women not only do not work, but have also stopped looking for a job. This renunciation is rooted in cultural and structural factors: the persistent social expectation that assigns women the primary role of mothers and caregivers and the chronic lack of adequate public services to support families.

Shortage of services

The issue of childcare services remains emblematic. According to the latest available data, for every 100 children between the ages of zero and two, in Campania there are barely 13 places available in crèches, in Sicily 14. Numbers that make it clear how access to work, for many mothers, is in fact hindered by the lack of social infrastructures.

When women manage to enter the labour market, marginality takes other forms. 74% of those employed with vouchers or casual work contracts are women. A concentration that signals greater exposure to precariousness and contributory discontinuity, with effects that drag on throughout working life.

Salary gap

The gap widens on the pay and career front. In the private sector, the wage gap exceeds 25%. This is not just a question of lower salaries, but a real 'snatching' of growth opportunities. The imbalance in top positions is evident: only 22% of permanent managers are women. Female representation at the top therefore remains in the minority, confirming a predominantly male decision-making structure.

The consequences are also reflected in the pension system. Women, who are more often engaged in discontinuous or part-time careers and burdened by unpaid care work, receive up to 46% lower old age pensions than men. A gap that translates into economic terms the weight of the sexual division of labour and the lack of appreciation of care work.

The Power System

The dominant power model still rewards the logic of vertical command and aggressive competitiveness, visible in corporate dynamics as much as in institutional arrangements and in the recent balances of international geopolitics. In this context, women's access to top management often appears subordinate to their adaptation to an already defined value system.

The point, however, is not only to increase the presence of women in the control rooms. The data suggest that the structural knot lies in the model itself: a system that continues to rely on a division of labour that offloads the cost of social reproduction onto women, while care work remains largely invisible and unpaid.

Neutrality, even in public spending policies, turns out to be a fiction: no euro invested is truly gender-neutral. Today's economic and institutional power is also based on this structural imbalance. Questioning its foundations is no longer just a question of fairness, but of the sustainability of the country system.