In the year of the pandemic outbreak, 2020, the female employment rate dropped to 49% after breaking the 50% mark for the first time in 2019. And above all it drops after seven years of increases, when in 2013 it stood at 46.5%. Penalized women with children: 25% less than their peers who do not have children are employed. The growth of female businesses is also slowing down, after a steady increase since 2014. Little progress on the executive front: in 2020 there is no female CEO in large companies listed on the Italian stock exchange. This is what emerges from the 2021 Gender Report that the undersecretary of the Mef, Maria Cecilia Guerra, will present in Parliament in the coming days.
Young people are the most disadvantaged
The gap between the female and male employment rate is still growing, reaching 18.2 percentage points.
This setback has repercussions above all where there are the greatest criticalities of the Italian labor market, which refer to intergenerational and territorial gaps. In fact, it is younger women who record both the lowest employment figures and the most significant reduction in the year of the pandemic. In 2020, the employment rate of women aged 15-34 was 33.5%, while in 2019 it was 35.9% (-2.4). For women between 35 and 44 years old and between 45-54, the rate, on the other hand, stood at 61.7 and 61.8% in 2020, down compared to 2019 when they were 62.4 and 62. , 3%.
Nearly 2 million involuntary part-timers
For 60% of workers with part-time contracts, the reduction of working hours is a condition suffered and not a choice. The share of women forced to part-time went from 60.8 to 61.2% between 2019 and 2020, against an EU average of 21.6%. Also in this case the gap is very wide: in absolute terms there are 1,866,000 women with involuntary part-time contracts against 849,000 men.
79% of the 300,000 minors affected by Covid leave were taken care of by their mothers and 21% by their fathers. This figure must be read together with that of parental leave: here we see an improvement in the share of beneficiary fathers which, in the period 2011-2020, grew from 10.8 to 22.3 percent.
Guerra: “In Italy children and work are irreconcilable”
“Compared to the previous crises – explains Undersecretary Guerra – the impact of the pandemic was particularly negative on women: it resulted not only in a significant loss of jobs in sectors dominated by women, such as commerce and tourism , but also in worse working conditions, in an increased economic fragility and in a life-work conflict even more bitter than in the past ».
Women with small children pay more: “These are dramatic numbers that highlight discrimination in discrimination – underlines Guerra – the worsening of the situation of mothers, especially younger ones, demonstrates, as if there was still a need, that at the beyond the rhetoric of support for motherhood, in our country children and work continue to be largely irreconcilable ”.