In Italy, inactive women between the ages of 30 and 69 are over 7 million.
Too high a number, if we consider that they represent 43% of women in this age group, while in the EU average
32% women who do not work or seek employment are
24% in Germany and 19% in Sweden. Too many when compared to the number of just over 20 million employed. And a considerable number both on a social and economic level: motherhood involves consequences on the choice but inactivity extends beyond the period in which they choose to focus on the family, due to the absence of supports. This is what appears in a research by Randstad Research.
Overall, this is "an apparently immutable phenomenon, if we consider that at the aggregate level the
activity rate has remained stable from 1990 to the present day
, affecting above all the South and the islands, where more than one in two women (58% ) is inactive, while in the North three out of ten. In the 30-69 age group, inactive women are overwhelmingly
full-time housewives
(4.5 million), either by choice or "forced", as a consequence of discouragement for barriers to entry and re-entry into the labor market. And then retired (2.5 million, including retirement, social and disability pensions), with a prospect of third age more uncertain than men, due to lower pensions, reached at a younger age.
The female inactivity rate is strongly linked to age
: from 70.6% of active women between 35 and 44 years, it drops to 47.4% between 55 and 64 years. What solutions? In a country where public spending on crèches is only 0.08% of GDP, among the lowest in Europe, the 4.6 billion euro investment envisaged by the PNRR to increase by almost 265,000 places early childhood services goes in the right direction. But to complete the effort, better distributed parental leave and a tax system that does not penalize the work of the second worker in the family would be needed. Gender equality in childcare can be promoted through the individual right to non-transferable, well-paid and equal-duration leave for women and men. Another area in which to invest is that of training. Also because for women,the level of education seems to have a particularly high importance, more than for men, to the detriment of experience and other factors that can contribute to employability.