Fewer than one in three women work in the South, with an employment rate of 28.9% against 52% in the North.
This is what a study by Confcommercio reveals which underlines that the employment rate of women in Italy is equal to 43.6%, against a European average of 54.1%, "a much wider gap than that relating to male employment: 60.3% in Italy, 64.7% in Europe".
"If the female unemployment rate in Italy, equal to 11.1%, were brought to the European value, which stands at 7.2%, there would be 433,000 more employed women", explains Confcommercio.
As for the rate of participation in the labor market, however, "Italy suffers from a chronic delay in comparison with the main international partners" as regards the female component, the analysis notes, underlining that "if one evaluates the 2019 data, not affected by the statistical effects of the turbulence that the pandemic has produced, our country is substantially aligned in the values concerning the participation of men, while the distance is wide if we look at women".
In more detail, the female participation rate compared to the European average value is two and a half points lower in the North, five points in the Center and twenty-five points in the South, stopping in this area at around 36%.
"A female participation rate of 36%,
compared to an average close to 50% in Italy and almost 60% in Europe, it indicates a real pathology.
Considering an unemployment rate of almost 20%, in 2019, the number of employed women in the South reached just over 2.2 million: that is to say that only 28.9% of women aged between 15 and 74 in southern regions worked against a share of almost 52% in the North", underlines the study. "To improve this condition - explains Confcommercio - beyond the necessary active policies and the wide-ranging reorganization of services to support reconciliation of living and working times, which suffer from significant delays in the South, the solution can only go through the enhancement of productivity and the increase in innovation and investments in the tertiary market".
