Crisis and female labour force heterogeneity in Italy

The effects of the economic crisis are still lingering in many Western European countries. The crisis has mainly impacted on the male labour force, with increasing unemployment and decreasing employment rates. In Italy, although the effects of the crisis are less severe on employment than in other countries, important structural trends have inverted:, for the first time starting from the mid Nineties, female activity and employment rates are no longer increasing. Furthermore, the crisis exacerbates the traditional structural weaknesses of female employment (e.g. segregation, precariousness, work life balance). Better understanding is needed on what its impact is on the female labour force as it is likely to be complicated by the heterogeneity of women’s profiles (Hakim 2010) and, in the Italian case, by the huge North-South divide that gives rise to very different sets of opportunities and constraints in the two macro-areas. The paper deals with the impact of the crisis on the female labour force in the North and South of Italy under the hypothesis that female profiles are heterogeneous and that these profiles have been differently penalized in the two macro-areas of the country. On the basis of the Italian Labour Force Survey cross sectional and longitudinal micro data, we build up different female profiles stemming out from women’s commitment to work, wondering whether there are dissimilarities in their distribution and composition in the North and South of Italy. We will show that the profiles assume different (counterintuitive) features in the two macro areas of the country. Morover, the paper assesses the impact of the crisis on the different profiles.