Mother or worker? In 2023, this remains one of the most perennial questions for Italian women, who have fewer and fewer children and still have to choose between family and career. One road seems to exclude the other when there is at least one dependent child. If there are two children later, 56.1% of them quit permanently.. This is due to a lack of adequate social welfare policies, care services such as day care centers and nursing homes (often cared for by women), and a lack of strong company policies that value the working mother. and not a loss, an opportunity and not a limit.
What speaks for itself is the new report by Save the Children “Equilibrists, motherhood in Italy in 2023”, which paints a disturbing picture for our country, in which the employment gap between men and women is 17.5% but growing in the presence of children. In the age group of 25-54 years, with a minor child, the number of employed mothers stops at 63%, against 90.4% of fathers, and with two children, only one of two women remains in the profession, against fathers who work even more (90.8%), with the gap widening to 34 percentage points.. An abyss of missed opportunities for women who continue to sign contracts for one-off jobs because they are no longer economically viable. In fact, when there is work for women, a third of working women have a part-time contract (32% of cases vs. 7% of men). The quota rises to 37% for dependent children, compared to 5.3% for fathers, and for 15% of them this is a forced part-time job at the insistence of the employer or circumstances.
The situation varies depending on the geographical origin: in the South, the employment of women is stable at 46.4% and decreases to 39.7% with children versus 78.9% in the North (71.5% with children). In particular, the most “favorable” regions for mothers are the autonomous province of Bolzano, followed by Emilia-Romagna and Valle d’Aosta, while the most unfavorable conditions for mothers with more than one dependent child are recorded in Sicily and Campania. Basilicata’s black shirt is in last place in the Mothers’ Index developed by Istat for Save the Children. Education qualification also matters: according to a study in Italy, working mothers with a diploma account for 83.2% of cases. It drops to 60.8% when 60.8% of working women have only a high school diploma, and among women with a high school diploma this falls to 37.4%.
To believe in the growth of women, in their literacy and career, without depriving them of the joy of motherhood, means not only counteracting the phenomenon of demographic winter, but also invest in the most neglected half of the country and contribute to its economic growth. In other words, if we don’t want to protect working women for egalitarian social reasons, let’s do it on an economic basis. Research confirms that where women work more, more children are born, and therefore we are working together to reverse this negative trend, otherwise Italy is destined to become a country without a future.
Source: Elle