Italy is not a country for women, at least if you look at the world of work and the data regarding employment, where there
are 9.5 million working women compared to 13 million men.
A gender gap not the result of free and legitimate choices, but the result of contextual conditions and a still discriminatory social perception of women.
Confcommercio and the National Labor Inspectorate confirm it: jobs for men are growing twice as fast as for women and Italy remains at the bottom of the EU for the lowest employment rate of women, who are underpaid and have often precarious jobs , in non-strategic sectors.
The latest national data available for 2022 also says otherwise.
General resignations in 2022 in Italy grew to 61,391 with an increase of 17.1% compared to 2021, but of these almost
73% concern women who report difficulties in managing private life and employment.
The photograph of those who resign, looked at closely, gives further information: those who leave are mostly women with children (1 in 5 is a new mother), 63% of them give up their job because they cannot find a balance between caring for their children and their profession, against 7.1% of fathers who resign mainly to change companies and advance their career.
Almost 45,000 women left work after maternity, an increase of 19%
compared to the previous year due to the lack of local support services for early childhood.
However, the situation of new mothers is only the tip of the iceberg of the difficulties that women experience at work:
discrimination and mobbing remain, in fact, the most widespread problems that fuel the existing gender gap.
Sensitized by the testimonies collected in its psychological help desk, Mama Chat - the first European body to offer online psychological assistance through low-cost psychotherapies and a free and anonymous chat desk - has chosen to bring the topic "Women and Work" into the spotlight for Women's Rights Day on 8 March 2024.
Founded by Margherita Fioruzzi and Marco Menconi in 2017, in five years it has welcomed 37,000 women, girls and boys in psychological and social fragility and victims of mistreatment and gender violence.
Precisely the voices collected by the psychologists responsible for the online chat desk (available 6 days a week), describe difficult scenarios affecting the workers which bring with them a
sense of guilt, loss of independence, perceptions of inadequacy, panic attacks, states of anxiety until depression.
Among the 6,000 chats received by Mama Chat in 2023, many are women who have
fear of relocation and feel discrimination and separation from the social fabric in which they work, but there are also those who have been discarded in favor of a man just because they are a woman
, many are exhausted by managing the work load and extra-work care tasks still seen as a female responsibility and who has put the desire to become a mother on hold so as not to remain unemployed with more or less explicit pressures.
At the dawn of 2024 in Italy, the mere fact of being a woman still acts as a deterrent for hiring.
«The lack of tools to understand the social pressure that women experience emerges every day in our chats.
The women who write to us do not feel free in their life choices and do not think they are capable of reacting, perceiving themselves overwhelmed in a society that inherits paternalistic stereotypes.
This pressure, unconsciously, leads them to cancel their individual fulfillment, incapable of making personal choices to the detriment of their fulfillment", explains Cristina Sala, general manager of Mama Chat.
«Many young adults return to their families after a first approach to the world of work, most often precarious and underpaid, and seek psychological help for the loss of independence often linked to the sense of guilt for having failed.
We listen to them and help them find answers, underlining that having the courage to talk about it is the first step towards self-determination and professional success."
The issue of work is crucial especially for women who are still sadly demoted and ask for equal rights and equal wages as their male colleagues.
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