cThere’s still a long way to go if, at the interview, the question you should never ask (“Do you intend to start a family?”) is pitted with feigned nonchalance, putting the candidate with good grades and high expectations in difficulty, ready for anything but gender bias.
Danda Santini director of “iO Donna” (photo by Carlo Furgeri Gilbert).
There are still incorrect behaviors to unhinge if the women in the company are scanned like pieces of butcher’s shop by colleagues convinced that virility is exhibited with judgments from the barracks. There are still measures to be taken to prevent Italian women from leaving their jobs when their child is born because they have no support.
And there are more to review, if yet resignations during maternity leave are accompanied by a subsidy which could instead be used for aid or daycare and allow women to remain in the labor market. As long as we really believe in nursery schools, and it doesn’t happen that after having promised them in the Pnrr they once again remain a dead letter.
There are adjustments to be made if the annual salary of mothers 15 years after the birth of the firstborn is on average about half that of childless women; if a woman’s salary is on average 15 percent lower than that of her peers (and up to 20 percent lower among graduates and executives). If those few women who have arrived at the position of managing director correspond to an audience that is at the end of their career with meager pensions due to the continuous interruptions due to family causes, exhausted by the double load of stress, at home and at work.
Image by Cinzia Zenocchini
A culture shift is yet to pass, though in offices, whoever bangs his fists hardest on the table makes a career, if presence wins over efficiency, if the merit criteria do not change and are not rigorously applied. But we cannot forget what has been done to quickly recover, in the space of just over a century, an exclusion that lasted millennia.
From the first claim of “piscinine”, the apprentices of the Milanese tailors of the early twentieth century, girls aged seven to fourteen exploited on shifts of fifteen hours a day, at “young ladies”, the typists who arrive in offices in the 1950suntil to women managers of the eighties, and then the women’s quotas and the conquest of political power today, how many jobs and rights wrested with determination, one after the other.
And how many decomposed reactions throughout history to block the processforbidding books and education for women, locking them at home and relegating them to unpaid jobs, and then considered culturally unfit to teach in high schools, unable to judge lucidly in the courts, unstable due to hormonal causes.
It was only the day before yesterday, it was the time of our grandmothers. Today we are at the top: still a few, of course. Role model, to show the way. But that is clear and well drawn. Turning around to look at it once in a while is good for everyone.
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