That plan, according to the feminist association Period Think Tank, in addition to reporting problems, is not promoting gender equality and risks increasing existing inequalities even further. From the latest data (here is the Period platform) in fact, it emerges that 65.5% of the 170,481 Pnrr notices analyzed derogated from the protection mechanisms to encourage the inclusion of women, young people and people with disabilities, while only 6% present gender reward measures. Most of the cuts are in sectors that already have little female employment and which are however those with the greatest spending and investment forecasts, to the detriment of already female sectors such as care, social work and healthcare. Great proclamations are made to support female employment (the lowest in Europe, with 55% of women having a job compared to 69.3% of the EU average, according to Eurostat data), but the opportunity of European funds to increase job opportunities.
What does it mean to go on waivers? The Pnrr provides reward and conditionality mechanisms for the use of funds to promote the employment inclusion of women, as well as young people under the age of 36 and people with disabilities, in the context of public contracts financed with resources of the Pnrr, provided for by Legislative Decree 77/2021 (article 47).
The same decree has opened the way to numerous possibilities for derogation, even if specific reasons are needed to derogate and these have not been disclosed, even if it is, to all intents and purposes, public data.
“The problem”, according to the president of Period Think Tank Giulia Sudano, “is that without a regulatory obligation to apply quotas and reward measures they would not have been applied structurally and transversally by the contracting authorities. The lack of transversality of reward measures and quotas clearly emerged, demonstrating that the implementation of the Pnrr is betraying the commitment to guarantee gender equality as a priority of the plan”.
According to the feminist economist Azzurra Rinaldi, to comment on this topic it is necessary to return to the origin of the Pnrr: “the plan was born with Next Generation EU to counterbalance the effects of a crisis resulting from Covid-19, effects which moreover affect above all the female labor market, with the idea of laying the foundations for future generations. Hence precautionary measures arise to prevent the typical ‘Italian-style’ dysfunctional mechanisms from excluding the most vulnerable groups also from new forms of employment”. And, instead, in 62.8% of the cases analyzed by Period Think Tank there is talk of a total exemption, in the sense that there are tenders that do not include the legislation on gender procurement at all. The region that has the highest share of exemptions out of the total number of tenders is Molise (79%), the one with the lowest share is Valle d’Aosta (45%).
“This is a contradiction with the economic logic underlying the Pnrr – that of remedying the negative effects of the Covid crisis on female employment – and, on the other hand, it betrays the
spirit of Next Generation EU, which aims to prepare the ground for future generations”, continues Rinaldi. “Moreover, this approach is totally contrary to the recognition that women and young people represent the best human capital in the country, which continues to be excluded from most hiring processes. This is not only a problem linked to the PNRR or Next Generation EU, but also a lost opportunity, since the optimal use of this human capital could have a multiplicative effect on income, an effect that is currently weakened by its under-utilization ”.
Where are the major exceptions
The data were obtained with the cross-work of Period Think Tank’s data analysts and the contribution of the onData association, because the published datasets were not interoperable, that is, they did not easily speak to each other. It was therefore necessary to write directly to the relevant institutional sources several times to obtain clarification.
If we consider the total derogations, the mission with the highest percentage of totally derogated calls is mission 1 (digitalization and innovation) with 69.4%, closely followed by mission 2 (green revolution and ecological transition) with 69. 2%. As regards partial exemptions, it emerges that: the mission with the highest percentage of partially waived calls (12.5%) is mission 6 (health), followed by mission 5 (inclusion and cohesion) with 6.4 %. In last place we see mission 1 with only 0.3%.
For Sudano “these data confirm the lack of transversality of the employment quotas and the given reward measures their concentration in areas where there is already a significant female presence”.