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Υπαρχει γενικοτερο προβλημα στην Ιταλια...Few notes from the new book "Italians" by "Economist" journalist, John Hooper (c) 2015, on the miserable state of women in Italy.( 2015 : 146-154 )Each year, the World Economic Forum ( WEF ) publishes its Global Gender Gap Report, which aims to assess women's status in each country according to a variety of criteria, including economic participation, political empowerment, educational attainment and various health-related indicators. In recent years, Italy has bobbed up and down in the rankings, but its position as of 2013 was close to the mean : the WEF put it at seventy-first place. That was twenty-six places below France and, perhaps more surprisingly, forty-one places below Spain. Women in Italy were reckoned to be getting a worse deal than those in Romania and eleven African states.The area in which Italy scored worst was economic participation. Recent EU and OECD figures have put the number of women in employment at around half the total female population - the lowest proportion in any large EU state. Inevitably, that also means a much higher proportion of housewives. But since there are twice as many women as men who say they are keen to work but have given up on looking for a job, it is clear that many of the five million who work only in the home in Italy do so reluctantly. A survey carried out in 2011 indicated that Italian housewives were not just reluctant but desperate : their level of dissatisfaction was significantly higher than in either Spain or France. Unsurprisingly, very few women are to be found in Italy's boardrooms. By 2013, they accounted for only about 8 percent of the directors of leading Italian firms - once again the lowest share in any big European economy. In Spain the figure was 10 percent, in France 18 percent, and in the UK and the United States it was 17 percent. A detailed illustration of how women are squeezed out of the labor market as their careers advance emerged the same year in a study of higher education ( 3 ). By then, well over half of the graduates being turned out by Italian universities were women. But the proportion of associate professors was barely a third and the share of full professors one in five.But universities also feature repeatedly in allegations of what is known as "ricatto sessuale", or sexual extortion.The cases that surface in the media usually involve university teachers alleged to have asked a student or Ph.D. researcher for sex in return for a pass or high marks. It is reasonable to infer that a lot of ricatto sessuale goes unreported and indeed unmentioned : in the cases in which the blackmail succeeds, neither party has much interest afterward in drawing attention to what happened. To judge by the accounts of foreigners who have worked in higher education in Italy, the exchange of academic favors for sex may not be typical, nor is it uncommon.But my subjective impression - backed up by just a shred of objective evidence - is that ricatto sessuale has come to be regarded by quite a few Italian women as regrettaable but unavoidable fact of life. The shred of evidence is a poll - with a sample that was less than statistically significant - commissioned by a women's association, Donne e Qualita della Vita ( "Women and Quality of Life" )-(4). It involved asking 540 women university students if they would be ready to give sexual favors to advance their careers. Only one in five gave an outright no. Almost 20 percent said yes, with the remainder - roughly three out of every five - giving a coy "Don't Know."How has a country that once had a dynamic and assertive feminist movement fallen so far behind ?To some extent what happened in Italy after the heyday of feminism is what happened throughout the world. A generation came of age in which the women no longer wanted to minimize the differences with men. Glamour came back into fashion and street demonstrations in support of women's rights began to seem outmoded.That, however, was partly because women in the 1970s had secured, if not all of their aims, then enough of them to satisfy a large percentage of the female population. Italy stood out inasmuch as the outstanding conquest of the legalization of abortion was so unexpected and complete. Maybe, having won such a resounding victory, the warriors on the female side in Italy's battle of the sexes were all the more disposed to rest on their laurels.The verdict of some Italian feminists, however, is less charitable. They feel that the movement took a disastrously wrong turn. Partly because of their disillusion with the men of the New Left, Italy's leading feminist thinkers shifted the emphasis - to a greater extent than in most other countries - away from the demand for equal rights and toward the analysis of gender differences and the exaltation of female qualities. According to the interpretation, women's liberation was sacrificed on the altar of what might be called women's pride. Certainly, that explanation would help explain the ease with which Silvio Berlusconi was able to use his growing influence in the media to spread a very different view of female sexuality beginning in the 1980s : he was like a general marching onto a battlefield that had been deserted by his enemies. What is incontestable is that the Berlusconi years saw very little resistance to the imposition of the values that the media tycoon represented - and indeed lived out in his own life, both public and private. Though the one time prime minister has always insisted that he "loves women", his attitude toward them has often been condescending and sometimes downright contemptuous. When Spain's Socialist leader Jose Luis Zapatero appointed a cabinet in which half the ministers were women, Berlusconi called it " too pink ". His own idea of bringing on women was made abundantly clear when he appointed Mara Carfagna, a former showgirl who had posed as a topless model, to be his minister for equal opportunities. It was only when the scandal over his Bunga Bunga parties reached its height in 2011 that Italian women finally reacted with demonstartions that eventually spread to more than 250 Italian and foreign cities under a slogan inspired by the title of Primo Levi's novel of wartime resistance, "If Not Now, When ? "Plans for revival of a broader women's movement on the back of those demonstrations fizzled out. But in retrospect it can be seen that the "If Not Now, When?" demonstrations marked a turning point. At the time, only a fifth of Italy's lawmakers were women. According to a new study by the Inter-Parliamentary Union, that was a lower proportion than in either Iraq or Afghanistan...