Female employment is increasing, but women are still penalised at work: they are more exposed to interruptions, reduced hours and career slowdowns at key stages of their working lives. ‘The central issue is not access to work, but the sustainability of women’s careers over time,’ according to the report ‘Between nurseries, part-time work and top management: why is equality at work still a mirage?’, edited by Valerio Mancini, Director of the RBS Research and Dissemination Centre.
In Italy, in addition to a gender gap of 19.4%, almost double the European average, after having a child, 7 out of 10 resignations are female, 29.3% of women work part-time (compared to 6.2% of men), and only 2.2% are chief executive officers. According to the report, the problem of equality in the workplace is not getting women into the labour market, but retaining them and helping them grow over time.
In 2024, the female employment rate continued to rise, increasing by 0.9 percentage points year-on-year in the second quarter of the year (ISTAT–CNEL, 2025). The positive trend was particularly evident among women in the older age groups: from 2008 to 2024, the female employment rate grew by a total of 6.4 percentage points, with an increase of around 20 points among the over-50s, while progress among younger age groups remained much more modest.
However, this improvement has not made up for the country’s structural lag. In 2024, the overall employment rate for the 20–64 age group in Italy stood at 67.1%, compared with a European average of 75.8%. In the same year, the gender gap in employment in Italy was almost double the EU average (19.4% compared to 10.0%), placing the country among those with the highest gap in the Union (Eurostat, 2025). There are also significant regional disparities within the country: in the second quarter of 2024, 62.8% of women in the north were in employment, compared with 59.9% in the centre and just 37.2% in the south, with a gap of more than 25 percentage points between north and south. The structural weakness of female participation also contributes to this picture. In Italy, the inactivity rate of women of working age remains among the highest in Europe: approximately one in three women between the ages of 15 and 64 is neither employed nor looking for work.
The decline in female participation in the labour market is concentrated mainly in transitions related to parenthood. In 2024, working mothers accounted for 69.5% of resignations validated during the protected period, compared with 30.5% for fathers (INL, 2025). In the three-year period 2022–2024, over 180,000 parents left work after the birth of a child, about 70% of whom were women, with an average of over 60,000 female departures per year. Confirming this imbalance, in 2024 the employment rate for mothers aged between 25 and 54 stood at around 62.3%, compared to 91.5% for fathers in the same age group (ISTAT, 2025).
Even when it does not result in leaving the labour market, pressure on employment continuity emerges in the quality of employment. In 2024, 29.3% of women aged between 25 and 64 were working part-time, compared with 6.2% of men (ISTAT, 2025); within this percentage, involuntary part-time work affects 15.6% of women, compared to 5.1% of men (ISTAT–INPS, 2025). This picture also includes new forms of work: digital platforms, on-demand work, online content creation and personal services mediated by apps, which offer flexibility and access to work, but often with less protection, irregular income and reduced social security.
‘A model that, in the absence of adequate guarantees, risks amplifying the fragility of women’s careers instead of reducing it,’ says Valerio Mancini.
The work environment also has a significant impact on women’s career stability. The most striking and recent data concerns sexual harassment in the workplace: according to ISTAT, in 2022–2023, 13.5% of women between the ages of 15 and 70 who work or have worked report having experienced sexual harassment during their professional lives, compared to 2.4% of men. This involves around 2.3 million people, over 81% of whom are women (ISTAT, July 2024). Alongside sexual harassment, the most common forms of violence include verbal abuse (56%), mobbing (53%) and abuse of power (37%), with significant consequences for mental health, including resignations, dismissals and career abandonment. From this perspective, the working environment represents a real drain on human capital: not only individual suffering, but also increased absenteeism and turnover, resignation from exposed roles (front office, travel, networking), changes of sector and, in the most serious cases, permanent exit from the labour market.
In recent years, measures have been introduced to support women’s participation in the labour market, in particular through the strengthening of early childhood education services and measures to encourage women to remain in employment. National coverage of nurseries has reached approximately 30 places per 100 children aged between 0 and 2 in the 2022/2023 academic year (ISTAT, 2025), marking an improvement on the past but remaining below European targets (33% as a minimum threshold and 45% by 2030). The growth in supply remains highly uneven: in the South, coverage is very low: Campania 13.2%, Sicily 13.9%, Calabria 15.7%; while in several regions of the North it exceeds 35%. These disparities are accompanied by a significant difference in public spending per child aged 0-2, which varies from €428 per year in Calabria to over €4,200 in Valle d’Aosta, affecting accessibility, waiting lists and compatibility with working hours.
On the employment front, in recent years, contribution incentives have been introduced for working mothers, particularly in the form of exemption from social security contributions for mothers with two or more children, with the aim of supporting their income and encouraging them to remain in the labour market. These measures have a positive impact on labour costs, but they are concentrated on permanent employment and only partially address female employment characterised by part-time work, intermittent contracts and greater precariousness. As a result, the overall effect of the incentives remains limited and insufficient to compensate for the structural weaknesses that continue to interrupt or slow down women’s careers over time.
In recent years, the presence of women in formal governance positions has increased significantly. In 2024, women accounted for 43% of positions on the boards of directors of listed companies (CONSOB, 2025). The proportion of companies in which female representation is at least equal to male representation is also growing: 19% of boards of directors in 2024, compared to 15% in 2023 (CONSOB, 2025).
However, this progress does not translate into equal access to the most decision-making positions. According to the analysis in the CONSOB Corporate Governance Report, women are CEOs in only 2.2% of cases and chairpersons in 3.5% (June 2025). On the managerial front, too, only 21.1% of executives and 32.4% of middle managers are women (INPS, 2025). The career pipeline therefore continues to narrow as one moves up the hierarchy.
Overall, the report shows that gender equality in the workplace in Italy is not a question of access, but rather the system’s ability to support women’s careers over time. The data indicate that inequalities develop throughout a woman’s career and require targeted and coordinated interventions rather than new isolated measures.
Three operational priorities emerge. The first concerns maintaining careers at key stages of life, starting with motherhood and the management of care responsibilities, through adequate services and greater sharing of family responsibilities. The second is the quality of work: reducing the use of involuntary part-time work, strengthening protections in new forms of work, and combating discrimination and hostile organisational climates that push many women to scale back or interrupt their careers. The third priority is access to decision-making roles. Progress in formal representation shows that binding policies work, but they must be accompanied by continuous and sustainable career paths. In this perspective,
“only integrated action on motherhood, quality of work and governance can transform the growth of female employment into real and lasting equality”, concludes Mancini.