Italian Women Set Back A Few (Hundred) Years

This won't do much to reverse the coverage Italy has lately received in the global press for the nation's persistently patriarchal and sexist cultural outlook: Ma-Vib, an engineering firm outside of Milan, has chosen only its female employees in a recent round of layoffs.

"We are firing the women so they can stay at home and look after the children. In any case, what they bring in is a second income," Ma-Vib officials reportedly told Italy's small business administration, according to the UK Guardian. Italy has the lowest female employment rate in all of the European Union. And according to the World Economic Forum's 2010 Gender Gap Report, Italy ranks 74th globally in women's rights, the New Yorker reports.

So you heard them, ladies.  Get those shoes off, start making babies and let your man take care of you however he sees fit.  Independence is overrated, as is financial responsibility.  It sure sounds like they just decided for those poor silly women that they should behave a certain way.  I don't see any consideration for single mothers or (gasp) an independent single woman.

The antics of Prime Minster Silvio Berlusconi, who is accused of paying an underage woman for sex and using his influence to get her released from a shoplifting charge, have lent new immediacy to longstanding questions about the status of women in Italy. The charges came to light last November, and in February, hundreds of thousands of women took to the street in Rome and 200 other Italian cities to protest Berlusconi's behavior--as well as what they say is a sexist culture.  "It's a scandal. I do not believe in his values, his behavior and the way he treats women. Italy doesn't have a future if these are the values that sustain us," Paolo Campedel, who attended a rally in Padua in northern Italy, told Reuters.

I'm glad to learn that someone gets it.  I'll be following this and reporting back on it as it develops.  Like the former Minister of Eurpean Affairs, I did not know it was as bad as reported.  For a comparison article, I once looked up the information and to quote Emma Bonino, I said it cannot be so bad.  I chalked it up to a cultural or social misunderstanding, but this is coming from their own.  Women are often treated poorly at work, and there is a huge difference in pay and potential between women and men.  In a word: unacceptable.