Donne, famiglia e carriera: persistenze e trasformazioni

The increasing number of women, who manage to overcome the so called glass ceiling - marking the passage to the highest levels of managerial careers - however limited, allows the adoption from now on of a more positive perspective. The intent is to try, moving from the biographies of those women, some reflections on the factors which have made them able to succeed where other women have failed. In this perspective the mutual combination of roles adopted within the couple, or in other words, the relationship between the partners represents a meaningful factor. The comparison between two groups of women - those in peak positions in private and public sectors, on one the hand, and those committed in politics, on the other - enables us to seize the different role that the man can play with regard to the wife's career. It also allows the understanding of the positive and negative aspects, both possibilities of combination and elements of tensions in a career-family relation, each time brought into play. For the first group of women combing career and family seems possible and the transformations that have taken place in the private sphere, within the couple, have made it achievable. For those women the family represents even an important factor in view of professional achievements. Women committed in politics experience instead a totally different situation. For those last ones the family-career trade-off still appears very strong. Multiple factors - for example, being a public face or, even more, the salary - contribute to make transformations more or less radical and easy.