ROME. 77% of new parents who quit their jobs in the year of the pandemic are women. An effect of the “gender gap” that sees Italy at the bottom of the European Union for female employment rate. “There is a profound gender difference in the data relating to the reasons for the resignations – notes the report of the National Labor Inspectorate -. As the difficulty of exercising parenthood in a manner compatible with one’s occupation is almost exclusively female. Reports of conciliation difficulties for reasons related to care services or reasons related to work organization, in fact, concern women in a percentage between 96% and 98%. The main motivation for the validations referring to men is instead the passage to another company “.
Reports
In 2020, there were 42,000 resignations of parents of children from zero to three years of age. The data comes from the National Labor Inspectorate which reports that women are 77% of the total number of people who have resigned. More than 92% of resignations and consensual resolutions concern workers classified as blue-collar or white-collar workers, with an age between 29 and 44 years and in 88% of cases the decision to leave the job is taken in the first 10 years of service. In the year of the pandemic, the resignations of fathers decreased compared to 2019 (-31.1%) compared to those of mothers (-13.6%).
Required Terminations
Overall terminations from employment in 2020 were over 9 million with a decrease of 17.7% on 2019. The main reason is the expiration of the contract, which involves more than 6 million relationships (-17.6% on 2019 ). The terminations requested by the worker and the female worker, including resignations (category within which validated resignations are inserted, i.e. those concerning parents of children under three years old) were 1.5 million (-15.1% ). The condition of parenthood – reads the Inl Report – structurally has a different impact on the participation in the labor market of men and women. In fact, there is a relationship between the decrease in the indicators relating to participation and employment in coincidence with maternity and in relation to the number of children. In the presence of children, male participation increases and female participation decreases. The transition takes place with the first child and increases with the second, without particular territorial differences. This dynamic has higher values in the 25-34 age group.
Trend
The dynamics are also reversed for inactivity. In the presence of children, women’s inactivity increases and men’s inactivity decreases. The employment of women with a head of the nucleus between the ages of 20 and 50 is 60% in the absence of children between zero and a year in the family unit and 50% with a child under the age of one year, while in the same group male employment is 86% without children between zero and one year and 90% in the presence of newborns. Out of 42,377 validations received from new parents, the most frequent type of withdrawal is made up of voluntary resignations (over 94%) while resignations for just cause and consensual resolutions are respectively approximately 4% and 2% of the total. 77.4% refers to women. Of the total applicants, 61% have one child, 32% have two children and 7% have more than two. The age of the child that most affects this phenomenon is that up to one year, so the need for first care prevails. 86% of validations are from Italians. 92% of the resignations come from office workers and workers. About half of the new parents who leave their jobs have started working for less than three years.
Sectors
The production sector in which validations are most concentrated remains the tertiary sector, a sector with a significant presence of women to which more than 72% of the measures adopted refer; also relevant is the data for industry, equal to about 15% of the total and construction, equal to just over 3% of the total. Out of the total number of validations, the most frequent reason continues to be the difficulty of reconciling employment with the care needs of the offspring both for reasons related to the availability of care services (38% of the total causal) and for reasons of character organizational related to one’s own working context (20% of the total of the reasons indicated).