In Italy the gender gap at work is still a concrete reality.

According to the results of a research carried out by Randstad Research, in our country there are over seven million inactive women between 30 and 69 years of age. A figure equal to 43% of the total female population in this age group.

The number is much higher than the average recorded in the European Union where women who do not work or seek employment are 32%, in Germany 24% and in Sweden 19%.

The study shows that motherhood weighs on choice but inactivity extends beyond the period in which women choose to focus on the family due to the lack of support.

This is a phenomenon that struggles to change over time, if we consider that at the aggregate level the activity rate has remained stable from 1990 to today and which mainly concerns the Southern Regions and the islands, where more than one in two women ( 58%) is inactive, while in the North the figure drops to three out of ten.

The inactive are mainly full-time housewives (4.5 million) by choice or "forced", as a consequence of the discouragement of barriers to entry and re-entry into the labor market, and then retired (2.5 million, including pensions of seniority, social and invalidity), with a more uncertain prospect of third age 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.

To counter the phenomenon, investments are coming from the National Recovery and Resilience Plan: in Italy public spending in crèches is only 0.08% of the Gross Domestic Product, among the lowest in Europe, which is why the NRP provides 4.6 billion euros to increase early childhood services by almost 265 thousand places.

(Unioneonline / F)