Università degli Studi di Roma. "Tor Vergata" Facoltà di Economia. Corso di laurea triennale in. Economia e Management.

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1 Università degli Studi di Roma "Tor Vergata" Facoltà di Economia Corso di laurea triennale in Economia e Management Tesi di laurea in Storia economica "Labor force participation in Italy, A gender study" Il Relatore Prof. Giovanni Vecchi La laureanda Flavia Saracino Anno Accademico 2010/2011

2 Introduction The interest in women s issues is the engine that has driven my research, which aims to study women s participation to the workforce in Italy, during the years , and to compare the Italian situation to that of the major European and world countries. Women s issues have been inspiring the historical, philosophical and economic debate over time, attempting to examine the reasons of the gender inequality. Recently, Daniele and Malanima (2011) have indicated the low levels of female labor participation as a cause of the general low occupational rate. They have also provided an international outlook that shows that Italy has to be regarded as an outlier. Yet, their empirical work has not been completely exhaustive for my research as it lacks the gender perspective I was looking for; my contribution is to retrace the sources of the time series supplied by Daniele and Malanima for the years as follows: (i) by collecting and clustering ISTAT regional census data on both male and female active population in the three main economic sectors; (ii) by calculating the overall labor force participation rate, as a ratio between the total labor force and the present (resident) population; (iii) by splitting the data by gender in order to determinate the female labor force participation rate. My work is organized as follows: Chapter 1 presents the current data on female labor force participation, with a spotlight on international comparisons; Chapter 2 is an insight into the Italian reality, and its regional differences; Chapter 3 concludes. 3

3 Chapter 1 Female labor force participation international comparisons Purpose of this chapter is to illustrate Italy s performance in the female contribution to the workforce in the last eighteen years. Table 1 shows the Eurostat Labor Force Surveys series indicating the female employment rate (age group 15-64) for the years and compares Italy to other seven major European countries and to the European Union as a whole. Labor force surveys are inquiries directed to private household, designed to get annual and quarterly information on the labor markets and labor force status, people (aged 15 and over) being either employed, unemployed or economically inactive, through a series of personal interviews on the base of the international standards from the International Labor Organization. The employment rate is the percentage of the employed persons in relation to the comparable total population, and according to the definition given by the ILO it is an indication of the relative size of the supply of labor available for the production of services and goods and is then considered a social key indicator. Main Eurostat statistic findings have estimated that employment rates vary not only across but also within the EU countries according to several patterns such as regions, gender, age and levels of education attainment. The data for 2010 is a merciless but not unexpected snapshot of the Italian situation: fortysix percent is the female employment rate, twelve percentage points below the European average. 4

4 Table 1- Female LFP in the main European countries and EU Year EU(27) Germany Greece Spain France Italy Netherlands Sweden Uk Source: Eurostat (2012) The evidence shows how Italy has performed in the worst way over a span of eighteen years, although a ten points increase in the domestic female employment rate, because of better education levels or the development of the tertiary sector. In the Mediterranean area the beginning situation, in , was rather similar as the level of female LFP in Italy was 36%, in Greece 37%, Spain had the lowest percentage of women in the workforce (31%); the table then shows the Spanish catching-up: in 2008 the female LFP rate was 48% against 45% in both Greece and Italy; in it was 55%, while 47% in Italy and 49% in Greece. The gap becomes larger in France and Germany: in 1993 their female LFP rates were respectively 52 and 55%, well above the Italian average; in rates for France and Germany seemed to converge to 58-59%, separating Italy more than 16 percentage points; in 2010 the gap with France was 14 percentage points and with Germany it was 20 points. 5

5 The difference with Northern European countries is even sharper: in 1993 Dutch women s employment rate was 52%, English women s rate was 61%, in Sweden 70% of women were hired. This huge gap does not seem to reduce over time. Figure 1 shows the results described in Table 1 and highlights the abnormal performance of Italy. Figure 1- Female LFP in the main European countries and EU 80 EU (27 countries) Germany Greece Spain France Italy Netherlands Sweden Uk Source : author s elaboration from Eurostat data (2012) 6

6 The same analysis can be carried out comparing Italy to some extra European nations. Table 2- Female LFP in world countries and Italy Year Algeria Argentina Brazil India Turkey USA Japan Italy Source: ILO (2012), key indicators in the labor market. For the US and Japan only: OECD In Italy s female LFP rate was equal to that of India (36%) and the worst performances were those of Algeria and Turkey, whose rates were below 30%. Italian women s contribution to the labor force is still far from that of the main South American countries, Argentina and Brazil, (40% and 53% respectively) and very far from that of the US and Japan (64% and 57%). From 2000 to 2010 trends in female LFP increased in Italy and in Argentina, whose female employment rate was not dissimilar from the Italian, Brazil, Algeria and Japan; they experienced a decrease in the US (from 68% to 62%) and India, where the rate rose to 37% in 2005 then fell to 30% in An interesting aspect emerges from the study of these data: growth in employment rate has been smoother than that of the European countries, during the eighteen years. 7