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EQUALITY

11 statistics that show the state of gender equality in Italy

On International Women's Day, The Local looks what it's like to be a woman in Italy today by the numbers.

11 statistics that show the state of gender equality in Italy
Women in Rome protest against gender-based violence on November 28th, 2020. Crime statistics show reports of stalking and abuse are on the rise in Italy. Photo by Tiziana FABI / AFP
  • Italy’s gender pay gap is under five percent; the fourth-lowest in the EU after Slovenia, Romania, and Luxembourg, according to Eurostat. However, while this sounds like good news, the low gender pay gap is closely connected to Italy’s high female unemployment rate and the fact that wages in Italy are below the EU average.

  • Fewer than half of working-age Italian women are employed. “The female employment rate is very very low, under 50 percent,” Italian statistics bureau Istat director Linda Laura Sabbadini stated when presenting the latest employment data in September 2021. “In Germany, to give an idea, the number stands at 75 percent. And when it comes to the employment of young women aged 25 to 34, we are in the last place in Europe”.
  • Women in Italy earn 16,000 euros a year on average. Of those who are employed, the average take-home pay for women was 16,285 compared to 23,859 for men. This means women earned almost a third less than men, though the number of paid working days recorded was only slightly lower for women. This wage inequality is linked to the prevalence of women in part-time jobs: 73.4 percent of part-time workers are women, according to Istat data from 2019.
  • Around 62 percent of Italian women’s work each day is unpaid, according to the World Economic Forum’s latest report, compared to 30 percent for Italian men. Women in Italy work longer than men on average – 512 minutes per day compared to 453 minutes – yet are more likely to be unemployed or work part-time.

READ ALSO: ‘Design a fairer country’: How post-Covid reforms could help close Italy’s gender gap

  • Women retire later and on lower pensions. Lower incomes translate to lower pensions. In the first half of 2021, monthly pensions paid to men in Italy were €498 higher at €1,429, compared to €931 for women, according to data from Italian social security office INPS. Almost twice as many men were able to retire early: 79,935 with an average pension of €2,104. For women, the number was 44,204 getting an average of €1,609.
  • 43 percent of Italy’s government is female. The cabinet of Prime Minister Mario Draghi is made up of eight women and 12 men, This sounds like an improvement on many previous governments, but most of the female ministers are without portfolio. The number of female prime ministers or presidents in Italy, meanwhile, is still a big fat zero.

READ ALSO: Why are there so few women in Italy’s most powerful jobs?

  • More than half of all Italians getting a degree are women. Nearly 59 percent of bachelor’s graduates are women, according to the OECD, while women make up just over 52 percent of PhD grads, according to national statistics office Istat.
  • Almost half of Italy’s adult women have experienced sexual harassment, says Istat. An estimated 8.2 million Italian women aged between 14 and 65 – close to 44 percent – have experienced sexual harassment in their lifetime, perpetrated in 97 percent of cases by men. An estimated 1.4 million women, or just under nine percent of the age group, reported experiencing physical harassment or sexual blackmail at work. 
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  • In 2017, 119 women in Italy were murdered, according to police figures. This is up from 117 in 2020 and 109 in 2019. In 59 percent of cases, the killer was a former or current partner, and 81 percent of murders took place at home or in a family setting.
  • Reports of stalking have doubled since 2019. In 2021, 15,720 women called 1522, the freephone number for reporting incidents of sexual violence and stalking. The number of reports has almost doubled since 2019 (8,427). Some 3.5 million women in Italy have been victims of stalking at least once between the ages of 16 and 70, equivalent to 16 percent. According to Istat, 2.2 million of these women were stalked by an ex. 
  • Women in Italy have an average life expectancy of 84.4 years, Istat says. Men are expected to live to 79.7, after the number dropped in 2020.

ITALIAN CITIZENSHIP

True Italians: Music festival casts spotlight on children left waiting for citizenship

Children born to foreign parents in Italy must wait until they are 18 to apply for citizenship, and then have just one year to do so or face a years-long wait - a process some have described as a 'psychological violence'.

True Italians: Music festival casts spotlight on children left waiting for citizenship

When rapper Ghali sang “I’m a true Italian” to 10 million television viewers last month, he spoke for hundreds of thousands of people born to immigrants in Italy who struggle to obtain citizenship.

The 30-year-old musician, born in Milan to Tunisian parents, sang a version of Toto Cutugno’s global hit “L’Italiano” (The Italian) at the Sanremo music festival, one of the biggest cultural events in Italy.

In doing so, Ghali – who was naturalised only at 18 – put the issue of the so-called “New Italians”, as second-generation immigrants are often known, centre stage.

Italy has one of the toughest citizenship regimes in Europe, with children born in the country to foreign parents unable to apply for an Italian passport until they are 18.

They have only one year to apply under a streamlined system, otherwise they must enter a costly and lengthy process, during which time they are left in limbo.

READ ALSO: ‘We’re Italian too’: Second-generation migrants renew calls for citizenship

“I feel Italian, I went to school here, Italian is the language I speak every day but I wasn’t a true Italian by law until I was 24, when I obtained citizenship,” said Daniela Ionita.

Now a spokeswoman for campaign group Italians Without Citizenship, she describes the failure to allow children to become citizens as “psychological violence”.

But she has little hope of a change in the law under the current hard-right government of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, whose deputy, Matteo Salvini, regularly rails against immigration.

Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini regularly rails against immigration. Photo by Piero CRUCIATTI / AFP.

Blood ties

Italy has long been a country of emigration, not immigration, and has taken an approach to citizenship that helps maintain ties with this wide diaspora.

Nationality is based on blood ties, granted to those born to or adopted by Italian citizens.

Foreigners can obtain citizenship, most easily if they have Italian relatives or marry an Italian, but for most it is a long and difficult path.

“The law on access to citizenship in Italy is one of the toughest in Europe,” notes demographer Salvatore Strozza.

Children born and raised in Italy have no innate right to citizenship, except in rare cases where their parents are unknown or stateless.

READ ALSO: Will my children get an Italian passport if born in Italy?

They must wait until they become adults to apply, and then submit their application for citizenship between the ages of 18 and 19, with proof of uninterrupted residency in Italy.

If they miss that window, it becomes a complex bureaucratic process, which can take at least three years.

“It’s the longest administrative procedure in Italy,” said immigration lawyer Antonello Ciervo.

“An Argentine who has an Italian grandfather will be naturalised faster than a person born in Italy to foreign parents,” he told AFP.

For children who arrived in Italy at a young age, they must also wait until they are adults to secure citizenship, in the same way as other “foreigners”.

Someone born in a non-EU country must show 10 years of residency – compared with four for those born inside the bloc – and prove they have the means to support themselves.

At least 860,000 people born in Italy to foreign parents are currently eligible for naturalisation, of whom 95 percent are aged under 18, according to national statistics agency Istat.

Failed reform

Previous attempts to reform the current system, which dates to 1992, have failed – the most recent in 2022, just before Meloni took office.

Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party has promoted the racist ‘Great Replacement’ theory. Photo by Andreas SOLARO / AFP.

Her far-right Brothers of Italy party is opposed to granting citizenship to those born here to foreign parents – and some members have raised the spectre of “ethnic replacement” of Italians by migrants, a concept promoted by white supremacists.

Meloni has focused instead on raising the birth rate in Italy, which has an ageing population.

Since her coalition came to power, several groups agitating for reform have paused their efforts.

“We are afraid that our efforts will be in vain or worse, that the naturalisation process will be lengthened” by the introduction of stricter checks, said Ionita.

“While waiting for a change in government, we are trying to change mentalities at a cultural and community level,” she added.

Some progress has been made on this front – Bologna, a bastion of the political left, in 2022 became the first commune to grant symbolic citizenship to all those born or raised in the northern Italian city.

“First we need to change the concept of who is an Italian within society, and then we can look to a change at the political level,” added Deepika Salhan, a member of another campaign group, “On the right side of history”.

By AFP’s Lucile COPPALLE and Gael BRANCHEREAU

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