With the female employment rate the third lowest in the OECD, Italian activists urge action on 'colossal loss to economy'
Enza Miceli has one word to sum up the life of a working mother in southern Italy: "impossible".
Last month, she received a call from her children's school asking her to come in for an appointment. Her husband was abroad. So Miceli, 44, a call centre worker, asked her supervisor if, just this once, she could slip out for two hours. "She said to me: 'Well, you need to choose between your work and your family. If you choose your family, you will never succeed at work.'"
Miceli chose her family and quit. "So now I am at home and I am a carer, mother, housewife, jack of all trades and feminist in spirit."
With a female employment rate of 46.5% – the third lowest in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), better only than Greece, Mexico and Turkey, and 12 percentage points lower than the EU average – Italy has a problem getting its women into work and keeping them there.
In a country which has a generally low level of employment and where the economic crisis has dealt a particularly heavy blow to young people, the so-called "female question" has not, until now, gained particular attention.
But, with an election a month away, economists and feminists are demanding the issue be taken seriously – as much for the country's gross domestic product (GDP) as for its female population. "Italy is not using to the best of its ability a significant part of its human capital – women. It is a colossal loss for our economy," wrote Alberto Alesina and Francesco Giavazzi, two leading economists, on the front page of Corriere della Sera this month. "The next government will have to put the question of female employment at the heart of its programme."
For many people who watched with horror and incredulity as Silvio Berlusconi spent years combining the job of prime minister with sexist buffoon, such a move would be refreshing. But they say that this element of his legacy, which drew on Italy's traditional gender roles and pushed them to grotesque extremes in the form of "bunga bunga" soirées and barely clad television showgirls, will be difficult to overcome.
"The idea that that's the career for a girl is a terrible educational thing," said Michela Cella, a Milan-based economist and mother. "I think that, even more than for the finances of this country, 20 years of Berlusconi was very bad in terms of culture."
When it comes to female unemployment, observers agree that tackling the cultural roots of the problem is crucial. In Italy, particularly in the south where the situation is far more acute, the female population is still expected, as Cella says, to be "the ultimate care-giver". She manages to combine full-time work with a family, but acknowledges she is lucky to have a relatively flexible job.
Maddalena Vianello, a researcher and feminist activist, believes a "revolution of mentality" is needed in order to redistribute the burden of unpaid domestic work, be it housework, childcare or looking after the elderly.
That may take some time. According to figures published in 2011 by the OECD, Italian women spent three hours 40 minutes more per day on unpaid work than their male counterparts.
Defenders of the status quo argue that women, in performing the role of what the Italians call the "angel of the hearth", are performing a hugely valuable function.
But Giavazzi, a professor of economics at Bocconi University in Milan, does not agree. "It's very inefficient because you have people with good university degrees who could be very productive on the market and instead work at home," he said. The argument that they are facilitating a booming demography is also wrong, he said, adding that Italy, with an average of 1.4 children for every woman, has one of the lowest fertility rates in Europe – lower, for instance, than Nordic countries where the female employment rate is much higher.
As Miceli discovered, if women manage to find work in Italy – in a country where the unemployment rate is 11% – their experiences can be discouraging. Families who cannot rely on relatives to look after their children – a common strategy among working-age Italians – will have to find childcare, the public provision of which in southern Italy is patchy and often over-subscribed. The work women find is often precarious, says Daniela Del Boca, an economist at the University of Turin.
What can the next government do to fix this problem? For many, the answer is clear: better public services that will allow women greater freedom by providing more care for pre-school children and elderly people. Others, such as Giavazzi, advocate easing the tax burden to boost women's pay.
Now that the subject is being discussed, is Miceli hopeful that things may improve? "I am only hopeful because I have young daughters and if I lost my hope I wouldn't know what to cling to," she said. But, she says, when she talks to other women in Puglia she realises attitudes are so ingrained that they will be hard to overcome. "This is a really awful thing, that we've got used to it. We treat it as if it's something inevitable that we cannot change."
Pregnant? Time to resign
If there is one feature of the Italian workplace that sums up the difficulties women can have while pursuing a career, it is the phenomenon of dimissioni in bianco, or blank resignations.
For decades, many employers have insisted that new members of staff – particularly female ones – sign an undated resignation letter which can then be used further down the line to terminate their contract. In practice, say economists, it is usually pregnant women who bear the brunt and prosecutions are rare.
In 2011, the Italian Institute for Statistics said it believed 800,000 women had at one point in their lives been forced to leave a job either during or after a pregnancy. "It's astonishing," said Daniela Del Boca, an economist at the University of Turin. "It's totally illegal. But they can do it anyway, because you want the job."
The practice has been a tricky issue for successive governments. Under Romano Prodi in 2007, a law was passed to clamp down on it; the legislation was swiftly repealed under Berlusconi in 2008 on the grounds that it would be too complex and too bureaucratic.
As part of its package of labour reforms passed last year, the technocratic government of Mario Monti singled out the issue, with welfare and employment minister Elsa Fornero declaring blank resignations to be a practice that weighed "heavily and negatively on the working conditions of women and on their dignity, representing a real breach of freedoms which are fundamental to civil society".
A new law was passed, and the government won plaudits for tackling the issue. But, say many observers, it hasn't fixed the situation.
"They tried to address the issue, but in a very complicated way which is not very effective," said del Boca.
Maria Vittoria Ballestrero, professor of employment law at the University of Genoa, has said the law, while well-intentioned, is easy for a cunning employer to get around.
There is now pressure on whoever forms the next government to solve the problem once and for all.
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