How is gender equality in Italy and in the EU?
The 2023 budget law does not promote gender equality in the world of work, inviting women to be mothers. The speech by Alessandra Servidori, professor of labor policies
At the end of 2022, the European Commission measured the result of the gender equality index in the countries making up the Union and drew very unedifying conclusions: gender equality continues to be at risk, and there are specific groups the most affected.
THE STATE OF GENDER EQUALITY IN THE EU
The state of gender equality in the EU reveals that progress is lagging behind, with an increase of just 0.6 percentage points compared to last year's edition. As a result, the current average EU score stands at 68.6 points out of 100, which is only 5.5 points higher than in 2010 which is the year in which the measurement started.
The Gender Equality Index 2022 focuses for the first time mainly on data from the first year of the pandemic 2020: the scores show strong warning signs in a context of continued uncertainty and turmoil. More pressingly, there is a turnaround in this year's score, with declines in several sectors for the first time since 2010, as findings show that specific groups of people, who tend to be in more vulnerable situations during periods of crisis, are more at risk where very marked gender dimensions persist.
IN WHICH SECTORS EQUALITY HAS DECREASED
In the aftermath of the pandemic, Russian aggression towards Ukraine and the resulting economic crisis, European Equality Commissioner Helena Dalli said both regional institutions and EU countries must pay attention to gender equality in their policy and budgetary measures.
Women, in all their diversity, must not lose out and progress on legislative proposals is essential to improve gender balance on boards of directors, achieve pay transparency and end violence against women and domestic violence.
The Gender Equality Index has seen declining scores in several sectors of the main domains considered in the index. A decrease in the labor market participation score indicates that women are increasingly likely to spend fewer years of their lives in the workforce, which hampers career and retirement prospects. In addition, fewer women than men participated in formal and informal education activities in 2020.
As COVID-19 has created unprecedented pressure on the health sector, gender parity has narrowed in health status and access to health services. Were it not for the progress in the "power" domain, the index would have recorded an overall decrease in score. Much of this progress is due to increased female participation in economic and political decision-making, which in turn is linked to the introduction of statutory quotas in a limited number of EU Member States. This underlines the importance of the political agreement reached in June 2022 by the European Parliament and the Council of the EU on the directive to improve gender balance on company boards.
THE IMPACT OF THE PANDEMIC
But the impact of the pandemic on specific groups of people is devastating: older women and men and women and men with disabilities have reported higher unmet needs for medical checkups. Furthermore, young women have faced higher levels of unemployment due to the economic repercussions of the pandemic, and women with a migrant background are at even higher risk.
A complementary online survey focusing on critical issues related to unpaid care time revealed an increase in overall care responsibilities during the pandemic. However, the increase was not evenly distributed between women and men, exacerbating existing gender inequalities. This is particularly the case in intensive childcare, where 40% of women, compared with 21% of men, spend at least four hours on a typical weekday caring for young children.
The gender gap in time-consuming housework has also widened during the pandemic: 20% of women, compared to 12% of men, do housework for at least four hours a day. Country scores also continue to present a mixed picture. Italy is stuck in 2019 at 60.1%; top performers include Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands at 84% although progress towards gender equality has stalled in Sweden and Denmark, while Greece, Hungary and the Romania have more difficulty promoting gender equality.
On a more positive note, since the last edition, the most significant increases in index scores have been seen in Lithuania, Belgium, Croatia and the Netherlands – while the EU index percentage is now only 68.6.
THE DIFFERENCES AT WORK
On the other hand, for example, the differences between women and men at work in Europe in high-income countries reveal a profound (but not surprising) gap. In fact, men carry out more paid jobs outside the home, while women take care of most of the unpaid jobs at home and even when they work outside the home they are paid less.
For example, various studies show that in the United Kingdom in 2019 a woman of working age earned 40% less than her male counterpart. The gender gap has improved by 13 percentage points in 25 years, thanks mainly to improvements in female education, but inequalities remain deep in the three factors that influence earnings in the labor market: employment, hours worked and hourly wages. The three components are connected to each other and in all of them the gap widens with the formation of a family.
For example, based on data and not on opinion, I agree with tracing inequalities in paid work to an unequal division of unpaid work, which makes it difficult for women to achieve the same results as men. Added to this are also widespread preferences and beliefs on the division of roles within the family: two out of five English women (and the same percentage of men) believe that it is right for a woman to stay at home if she has school-age children. The same Italian mentality is not so far away.
THE MESSAGE OF THE 2023 BUDGET LAW
Moreover, the 2023 budget law sounds like a strong invitation to women to take a step back from work . The message is clear: be mothers, be grandmothers, some de-contribution measures will mitigate the risk that more binding family commitments on your shoulders do not meet with the favor of businesses. Since, on the one hand, the month of parental leave, granted only to mothers and paid at 80%, of this local mini-reform of leave will in fact overlap with the changes that came into force last August from the transposition of European Directive 2019/1158 , thanks to which parents are given the right, as an alternative to each other, to take advantage of an additional three months of parental leave.
The renewal of the women's option at more favorable conditions for those who have had children, and the increases in the single allowance for children, graduated by age and number of children, show that early retirement is paid by women who join the women's option with a fully-contributory calculation also for those who could still avail themselves of the advantages of a mixed salary-contribution calculation if they continued to work.
In concrete terms, therefore, the measure hinders the closing of the gender pension gap which is still higher than 30%, discourages the recovery at mature age of any absences from the labor market due to children and family and perpetuates the idea that grandparents are preferable to nursery schools or that it is up to women to take care of the elderly in the family as soon as they have finished working, if even earlier is better.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/economia/parita-di-genere-unione-europea/ on Sat, 14 Jan 2023 08:01:29 +0000.