Labor force participation in Italy 1861-2010. A gender study.

3 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 1861-2010, 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 1861-2001 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.