The year of the pandemic was difficult for Italian mothers, about 6 million, who had to extricate themselves from work and small children left at home because they could not count on the support of nursery schools and kindergartens.
Overall in 2020 249,000 women lost their jobs and 96,000 were mothers, of which 4 out of 5 have children under the age of 5
. They are those mothers who, due to the need to follow the little ones, have had to give up their work or have been expelled. Almost all - 90,000 out of 96,000 - were already employed part-time before the pandemic. Mothers even more in difficulty in the South, with Campania and Calabria in the last places, while the situation is better in the north, where at the top, as has been the case since 2012, there are once again the Autonomous Provinces of Bolzano and Trento, followed this year from the Aosta Valley, which "surpasses" Emilia Romagna. The positive aspect is that in all the Regions there is a general improvement, due to a greater propensity for an equal distribution of family care and work loads within couples, even if not yet sufficient to reduce the existing imbalances. .
IS'what emerges from the sixth report
"Le Equilibriste: maternity in Italy 2021"
that Save The Children launches on the eve of Mother's Day to analyze the condition of mothers in Italy during the pandemic Even before the covid the situation was certainly not rosy: in 2019 the resignation or Consensual terminations of the employment relationship of working fathers and working mothers affected 51,558 people, but over 7 out of 10 measures (37,611, 72.9%) concerned working mothers and in most cases the motivation behind this choice was the difficulty in reconciling employment with the needs of the offspring.
It is no coincidence, Save The Children points out, if our country holds the record for the oldest mothers in Europe at the birth of their first child (31.3 years against an average of mothers in the EU of 29.4), not to mention of the birth rate which during the pandemic recorded a decrease of 3.8%, equal to 16 thousand fewer births, compared to the previous year.
Among the 96,000 mothers who lost their jobs between 2019 and 2020, 77,000 have a preschool child, 46,000 have a child in primary school (6-10 years), while the employed mothers with 11-year-olds have increased at 17 (+27 thousand). Employment rates of 15-64 year olds decreased for both genders, rising to 67.2% for men (- 0.8%) and 49% for women (- 1.1%). Thus the gender gaps in 2020 reach the threshold of 18.2%, penalizing some areas as always. If in the North and Center, in fact, they remain around 15%, the gap widens to 23.8% in the South.
The "family organizational shock" caused by the lockdown, according to estimates - underlines Save The Children - would have overwhelmed a total of about 2.9 million households with children under the age of 15 in which both parents (2 million 460 thousand) or only present (440,000) were employed while "conciliation stress", in particular, was highest among parents who were unable to work from home or use services (formal or informal) for childcare: yes it deals with 853 thousand households with 0-14 year old children, 583 thousand couples and 270 thousand single parents, of which 84.8% are women.
Given the "gloomy" picture, Save The Children calls for urgent policies for children, in particular it asks the policy to "immediately implement measures capable of creating an integrated system from zero to six years, which offers a quality and free service in which children have the opportunity to learn and experience educational contexts necessary for their development ".
