Women’s employment in Italy: a cultural and infrastructural challenge. The figures

In recent months, Italia has been setting new employment records. The unemployment rate has also fallen to its lowest level in the last twenty years and, as Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni pointed out in a post published to mark 8 March, “female employment has reached its highest level ever”. However, behind these positive signs lies a far more complex reality for Italian women in the workforce. Our country continues to rank among the lowest in Europe in terms of women’s participation in the labour market. One figure stands out above all others: in 2024, only 53 per cent of Italian women aged between 15 and 64 were in work, compared with an EU average of 66 per cent. None of the other Member States fare worse than we do. Even countries applying for EU membership, such as Serbia, are performing better.

Not only are we (far) behind the rest of Europe, but we are also improving at a slower rate: over the last fifteen years, the female employment rate has risen by 6 percentage points, compared with an average increase of 9 points across the EU. The gap is even more pronounced in the South, where just 37 per cent of women of working age are in employment. The result is one of the widest gender gaps in Europe: in Italia, on average, the percentage of men in employment exceeds that of women by as much as 19 percentage points, a figure second only to Greece.

Women who work do so for fewer hours. In 2024, women in employment in Italia were paid on average for 15 per cent fewer hours per month than men. One of the main reasons for this is the greater prevalence of part-time work. Three million women work part-time, compared with one million men. Often, this is not a choice. The unequal distribution of family responsibilities is the main factor behind this difference. More than 35 per cent of women working part-time in Italia do so for family reasons or to care for children or vulnerable relatives. These are reasons that lead only 5 per cent of their male counterparts to work part-time. The difficulty of balancing work and family life still leads many women today to leave their jobs or reduce their working hours. It is not surprising that the employment rate for mothers living with a partner is 12 percentage points lower than that of single women without children. Among the other factors hindering women’s participation in the labour market, Bank of Italy cites the choice of educational pathways associated with lower returns in terms of employment.

On the one hand, there is a greater tendency amongst women to pursue a tertiary-level qualification. At the same time, however, female students tend to favour humanities-based courses rather than those in STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics).

In Italia, the proportion of women aged between 25 and 34 who hold a degree in these subjects is, in fact, less than half that of men (16% compared with 37%).