Time.news – Great strides have been made for equality in the workplace but there remains a strong disparity in career advancement and pay for women. Sergio Mattarella celebrates 8 March at the Quirinale and underlines how the ceremony is “every year a precious opportunity to take stock of the condition of women, recording their progress and highlighting the critical issues”.
“A little more than sixty years ago a historic sentence of the Constitutional Court – the number 33 of 1960 – canceled an anachronistic law of 1919, still in force at the time, which excluded women from all public offices. It was the appeal of a woman. tenacious and courageous – Rosa Oliva – recalls the President of the Republic – to cause the cancellation of an unjust and discriminatory rule, in clear contrast with the Constitution. As a woman she was excluded from a competition for the Ministry of the Interior. the Constitutional Court and not the Parliament intervened so serious in terms of rights: a circumstance that makes us understand how many cultural delays and resistances the path of effective equality is dotted. The thrust that had led, in January 1945, still weakened. before the Constituent Assembly, to call women to vote. As happened, in almost all the municipalities of Italy, on March 10, seventy-five years ago “.
Mattarella stresses that “we have come a long way since that historic ruling. Today in some areas of the public service there has even been overtaking, the percentage of women working is higher than that of men. In the judiciary for example. Like, indeed, the Ministry of the Interior. In reality, it is not surprising considering that there are significantly more women in the Italian population than men “.
Ma ”if you look at the top levels, the predominance is still male. This happens above all to the top management boards of public and private companies and companies “.
“The freedom of access to public and private employment alone, in fact – denounces the Head of State – does not entirely solve the problem of female employment, in the face of an evident disparity in career progression and in the unjustifiable difference in pay. Not to mention discrimination in the workplace, in forms that sometimes border on coercion and violence “.
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