Ilona Lo Iacono
WVoN co-editor 

Many Italian feminists have long been concerned that the anti-Berlusconi protests organised by the women’s organisation “if not now, when?” were divisive, and drew the focus away from the real problems women faced.

“Women are mortified by the female unemployment data, the salaries and the career perspectives, the precarious jobs … not by the symbolic mercification of their bodies on television,” said Valeria Ottenelli, philosophy and public ethics professor at the University of Genova.

Elena Loewenthal wrote in La Stampa: “Why do women feel a duty to defend their dignity in light of the obscene spectacle filtering through from Silvio Berlusconi’s home…?

“Did men feel a duty to launch a demonstration to defend their dignity? Which, truth be told, seems to be more violated than our own. Did they feel a need to take their distances from that model of masculinity?”

The biggest scandal, surely, is that, according to the World Economic Forum’s 2011 Global Gender Gap Report, Italy ranks 74th, below Ghana and Bangladesh, on gender equality, due in large part to its low score for women’s economic participation and opportunity.

The female employment rate in Italy is just 46 percent, the lowest in the European Union after Malta.

And, even if women are feeling the traditional pressure to stay at home with children, the fertility rate is very low, at just 1.4 children per woman.

Research shows that large numbers of Italian women have reservations about motherhood; many women report that it’s a “daily struggle” and say that they are stressed and dissatisfied about their failure to reconcile motherhood with the world of work.

And while The Economist claims that Italy has an entrenched culture of “jobs for life”, and that workers with permanent contracts are “virtually unsackable”, women and young people enjoy no such stability.

Illegal practices such as “white resignations” – undated resignation letters which new female employees are forced by unscrupulous employers to sign – are used to terminate employment, allowing employees to be fired should they become too costly to the employer, for example, if they become pregnant or face long-term illness or disablement.

Mercedes Ortega, who was forced out of her job just days after she was injured in a traffic accident, said that “only the girls were made to sign the resignations… My boss said she did it to cover herself, because she’d had to fork out thousands of euros for a former employee’s maternity leave.”

Those seeking to enter – or re-enter – the workforce are likely to find themselves on the bottom tier of a two-tier labour system, thanks to changes made by Berlusconi’s government in 2003, which allow employers to offer short-term contracts with few of the benefits or guarantees of permanent employees.

A proposal to create one standard contract to replace more than 40 varieties of temporary contracts would reduce job insecurity and encourage female employment, said Daniela Del Boca, economist and family expert at Turin University.

Young people, who must also have stable employment before anyone will be willing to even rent them a flat, often don’t start their career until their late 20s if they are university-educated. This causes additional time pressure and conflict for educated women who wish to have children.

Approximately 60% of all university graduates in Italy are women, and they are well represented in all academic disciplines, including the traditionally male-dominated fields of computer science and mathematics.

However, even within the universities themselves, women’s careers don’t tend to reach the heights of men’s: women professors, for example, are half as likely as their male colleagues to get tenure.

The less education a woman has, however, the greater the gap between her prospects and those of a man with the same educational attainment.

A woman with only a secondary school education can expect to earn approximately one third less than a man doing the same job.