Dat thirty years old she studies and writes about women’s work and today Rita Querzè, journalist of Corriere della Serafelt the need to share the accumulated knowledge and to do so in a clear and simple way, «so that», he explains, «it reaches everyone, my mother who did the training and the girls in the third year of high school, the fact that we risk waiting indefinitely for gender equality which is due and absolutely necessary now.”
Equality at work, awareness is needed
For Querzè, now «is the time to increase awareness, change pace decisively and apply pressure from below, women and men, to push for change.” He explains which change in his book Women and work. Revolution in six moves (Post Editori), an essay which, he says, in the title intentionally draws on American manuals to give the sense of a late but still possible revolution, made up of reforms in acceptable times.
Let’s start from here: Italian women are last in Europe in terms of equality at work (source Eige, Gender Equality Index 2022). What, now, is the mother of all battles?
Making women truly free to choose whether to work or not. Because today the choice is fake, let’s face it. From the birth of a child, the context pushes them to disinvest from work. It is not a cultural question, it is an economic calculation, which starts from the fact that they earn much less than men: when she earns 1,500 euros a month and he 2,000, if she is the one who stays at home with optional parental leave paid at 30 percent the family loses 1,050 euros a month, while if he stays at home he loses 1,400. It’s obvious that she’ll end up taking the leave. So she stays at home for five months and then another six, and when it’s time to go back to work the cost of the nursery will weigh on the family – the average monthly cost is 450 euros – and, if she can’t count on grandparents and grandmothers, also the cost of a person who goes to pick up the child… Here, however, the law provides relief for the spouse who stays at home, therefore paid by the other: it’s money! Then add the fact that, however low, women’s salaries often exceed the ISEE income threshold with which they can access benefits such as the discount on nursery school fees. In short, we are talking about money that ends up discouraging the work of the spouse with the lower income, the vast majority of whom are women. It is understandable why in Italy only one in two works. I am not referring to the most qualified and remunerated, but to that 50 percent who are not qualified enough and who in Milan have a salary of 1500 euros and below and in Rome 1200: we are talking about a multitude of people who, with the arrival of a child, they set out on their own towards leaving the world of work.
If working isn’t worth it and, paradoxically, the State encourages women to leave, how do you get out?
First of all with more free and quality nurseries, and a major cultural operation throughout the country to make it clear that nurseries are an enormous opportunity. As for tax incentives, it is easy to add them, but removing them is much more complex. But we must begin to become aware that that money there (dependent spouses in Italy are around 3.9 million, with an expenditure for the State of around 2.5 billion euros, an average recorded by the CISL Caf, we read in the book , ed.) we are using them to discourage female work.
Women and Work, revolution in six steps by Rita Querzè, Post Editors, €22
The point is that, even when they remain in the job market, they generally occupy the most precarious, most flexible positions. I quote again from his book: women with a part-time contract in Italy are 31.6 percent compared to 9.1 percent for men. Our country has the highest female involuntary part-time rate in Europe. The wage gap also starts here.
There is a lot of talk about the pay gap, and rightly so, but the first thing to do is to put the issue of precariousness at the centre. We can no longer afford to wait: more female employment and more stability means more children. Employment and birth rate are connected.
There are professionals who are talked about very little, female entrepreneurs. You write about the need for public guarantees to encourage credit for women who want to start a business.
Nobody talks about female entrepreneurs. In our country, over the last ten years they have even decreased in number: they are forced to row against the current. One of them just told me how the passing of the baton took place with her father. Her father asked her brother to take over the reins of the company, and he didn’t want to. He was willing to entrust the company to his son-in-law so as not to let her daughter manage it, who, instead, really wanted to do that job. Eventually he gave in. Then you say that women have no self-esteem!
The long road to equality at work
Women did what they could to change things. We owe them the Gulf-Moscow law which brought 40 percent women to the boards of directors of listed companies, the law on gender certification, which rewards virtuous companies on the issue of equity, even the law on smart working, in 2014, forerunner of smart working. On a private level, we struggled to keep everything together: work, career, children, home. Yet equity remains far away. Were we naive?
We deluded ourselves into thinking we could do it, yes, I’m trying too, having written about women and work for thirty years, convinced that, at a certain point, we would be able to push the envelope. We said to ourselves: we’re good, we work very hard, in the end the system will only give in and recognize our skills and dedication. And instead it happens that today Istat draws conclusions: between home and company, those who are engaged in a full-time job work a total of 60 hours a week, compared to 43 for males. In Europe, Italy is the country with the most unequal division of domestic work, 70 percent of which is female responsibility. Some have even achieved the professional results they aspired to as girls, but at what cost?
In short, we women have tried to resolve an issue that concerns public welfare, taking care: an impossible undertaking, in reality. We also believed that if we placed a vanguard of highly trained professionals at the top of the companies, like a Trojan horse, they would then open the doors of the city and bring in the others. But when a vanguard arrives at the top of companies that have an organization designed for male workers without children or elderly parents to look after, can you think that they will be able to change them? If I were a man, the system would probably suit me like this. And in fact the system does not change. Last year, compulsory paid paternity leave was increased to 10 days, a step forward but nothing compared to other countries: in Spain it is 16 weeks, equal to that of mothers. In Italy, there are few fathers who take it. This is an obligation so to speak. In fact, we should promote it, push it, because fathers often don’t know about it or businesses discourage it, and maybe even explain that it shouldn’t be used for fishing. It is necessary to monitor its progress over time and, if it does not work, reformulate the intervention to ensure effective implementation. In our country, however, laws are made and then abandoned there in the field. It must be reiterated that we suffer from a mentality that unfortunately lasts and which reflects a precise productive and social structure: the public sphere – therefore work – in the hands of men, the private sphere – therefore care – in the hands of women.
Cultural changes take a very long time.
The real revolution is to change public welfare and, at the same time, go beyond the post-Fordist production model. Naturally, the condition is that patriarchy is overcome in favor of a model centered on equity.
When the employment rate of Italian women – at the bottom of the European rankings – is equivalent to that of men, around 70 percent, he writes that discrimination in the workplace will finally have been overcome. Will the Pnrr have given us a hand?
The Pnrr aims to increase female employment by 4 percent by 2026, an increase that is not sufficient and which, moreover, risks not even being achieved: 30 percent of the jobs generated by the projects were to be reserved for women and young people , but a series of exceptions have been introduced as a result of which in 75 percent of cases the constraint is not respected today.
When I heard about the 4 percent target outlined for the Pnrr, I thought: it’s not possible! At that moment I definitively realized that we couldn’t wait any longer and that I too had to make a contribution: I developed the idea for the book from that moment. Our country needs to generate great pressure from below, exerted by everyone, including men. The State must put in place a major coherent and shared plan of reforms with clear objectives, which deal organically with the issues of work, care and birth rates. The strategy of small steps has brought little results: if we continue like this, fairness will come when we will all be dead.
In these thirty years, in which you have talked about women and work, have you ever felt that an important change was happening?
Yes, in 2011, when the Gulf-Moscow law, considered cutting-edge in many European countries, has imposed gender quotas on the boards of directors of listed companies. And before, in ’96, when there was a very strong convergence in Parliament between the representatives of several parties to approve the law which identified sexual violence as a crime against the person and no longer against morality. Transversal alliances always create the conditions to bring home stable results: I greatly appreciated the parliamentarians who put the public interest first, because then they were certainly not rewarded by their respective parties. Even today I feel new air: I think of the sea of people who took to the streets last November 25th, including men.
She hopes for a less elitist feminism, which starts from the bottom.
I believe that women who have fought to break the glass ceiling, who have high levels of education and income and a strong awareness of equity issues should bring this awareness outside their respective narrow groups. We must indeed break the glass ceiling, which prevents the rise to the highest positions, but if we widened the concrete walls of the job market which today prevent half of us from accessing paid work, the ceiling would probably come down from Alone.
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