It's not worth it for a woman with children in Italy to work. She spends less by staying home and being a full-time mother.

The numbers speak for themselves, and according to calculations, a working woman's salary isn't enough to care for her children when she's not at home. In Calabria, only 1,2 percent of children attend a municipal daycare center. This is why women continue to resign.

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It's not convenient for women to work

WORK IS NOT A BENEFICIAL FOR WOMEN

Schools , nurseries , and offices are reopening , and women are faced with the age-old dilemma: work or stay home with their children , especially if they're young? Many women are faced with a forced choice: either they have to work, as the family needs the money, or they decide not to, even quitting their jobs. For a simple yet scandalous reason: it's not worth working and sending their children to nursery school.

TO LEARN MORE: Once upon a time, the best nurseries in the world were Italian; now everyone promises them, but no one builds them. The truth is told in this book.

Let's start with the number of employed women, which, according to ISTAT, accounts for 55 percent of the total. But only the remaining 7 percent are looking for work, and this low percentage should give us pause. It's as if women were so resigned to not working that they don't seek employment, but in reality, it's more of a matter of arithmetic than resignation.

Furthermore, female employment is not evenly distributed across the country. In the first quarter of 2018, six out of ten women in Italy aged 35 to 44 were regularly employed, but with the following geographical distribution: 74 percent in the North and 40 percent in the South.

It is not convenient for women to work 2

ALSO READ: Twenty-five thousand women leave their jobs to have a child. And 5,5 million forgo maternity leave.

IS IT BENEFICIAL FOR WOMEN TO WORK?

Now let's look at the relationship between income and the costs of childcare . Let's start with a woman with a net salary of between €1.200 and €1.300 per month, who decides to switch to part-time work (twenty hours a week) to look after her children. At this point, each child has a monthly enrollment fee, ranging from €120 to €500. The average is around €300. So, having two children is enough, and the woman who chose part-time work is already below her income in expenses . If you then add in the cost of gas to get to work, and other costs for any part-time help at home with the children (for example, an hourly babysitter), the result is clear: it's better not to work.

TO KNOW MORE: An impossible job in Italy? A mother. She's a tightrope walker, and if she gets pregnant, she'll lose her job.

PART TIME AND NURSERY

If, however, a woman decides to keep her full-time job, earning €1.200–€1.300 a month, she absolutely must find unpaid help (a parent? A close relative?), otherwise, even then, the numbers don't add up. Places in municipal daycare centers are extremely scarce: just 20 for every 100 children, with a huge disparity between North and South. So much so that in Calabria, only 1,2 percent of children attend municipal daycare centers, and in Campania, the figure is 2,6 percent.

At this point, a working woman must choose a private daycare center , a full-time babysitter , or a combination of both. Private daycare fees are at least double those of public ones. And, given the numbers, once again, women, according to the simple laws of arithmetic, find it more advantageous not to work. And they turn down a job where, among other things, the average salary, again according to ISTAT, is about 12 percent lower than that of a man. This explains the mass layoffs women face, signing a letter of resignation every time they are lucky enough to have a child.

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