ORfemale employment at risk. It is a very bad surprise that the new Public Works Procurement Code is reserving for women and businesses who finally want to build that gender equality that our country badly needs in order to grow. Indeed, the pink dot risks being definitively canceled from the texta requirement that rewards and offers tax advantages to companies that certify gender equality, thus demonstrating that they work to combat discrimination and aim to achieve effective equality between men and women in the field.
In short, the new Procurement Code risks putting those who are committed to promoting female employment on the same level and who perpetuates situations of widespread inequality.
Negative effects on female employment
Women and the country as a whole risk paying a very high price. First of all because – by now this is confirmed by several economic studies – having more women working (we are bringing up the rear in Europe!) means strategically combating the fall in the birth rate which is emptying our country, as the former Minister for Equal Opportunities and the Elena Bonetti family had well expressed in the previous Draghi government, who had set aside ten million euros to convince families with concrete actions that it is possible to give an economic future to own children and therefore choose to make them. As well as allowing women to deploy their talent in their careers means freeing up a wealth of skills and knowledge that our economic system has done without for a long time, but of which it expresses an enormous need today, given the very delicate phase of transformation it is going through.
Good news on the female employment front: the Women’s Bonus has been reconfirmed also in 2023 (Photo Getty)
Why you need the pink sticker
The Certification of Gender Equality for companieslaunched in 2021 – the so-called pink dot – aims in fact to trigger a structural revolution in companies, under the sign of the State, because it is really no more admissible than women are 60% of those who graduate, but just 30% of those in managerial positions.
Why delete it? Why interrupt that virtuous process that so many companies have now chosen to embrace by placing gender equality at the top of their goals? And then, it’s not just a question of the mere calculation of how many women a company hires and how many it promotes, but the opportunity to implement a cultural change that finally considers welfare for families, overcoming discrimination, the culture of ‘inclusion, shared parenting is a cornerstone of any policy, whether corporate or public. Not surprisingly, the Certification of gender equality is among the projects contained in the PNRR, whose projections envisaged an increase in GDP equal to a quarter of the overall increase produced by the PNRR itself. Not to mention, then, that the European Union has placed gender equality at the center of access to the funds of the PNRR.
Why this sensational step backwards? Many women’s goals have taken the fieldstarting from Le Contemporanee, Fuori Quota, Gamma Donna, ASviS, Network for Equality, Soroptimist Foundation, Aps National Association of Athletes and many others, clamoring for the pink sticker to be restored, because it is not a question – as the detractors claim – of useless complications, of cages for the business world, because it is now known that gender equality in companies generates profit: a brand new study has just estimated that inclusive companies invoice 23% more.
Weakening this mechanism means stopping a process of substantial change already begun and weaken what has already been acquired, for example by risking canceling the great work done in recent months which, among other things, led to law 162 on equal pay, which inserts the certification of equality and rewarding in contracts for those who do business by women and generate employment for women.
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