Gender Impact Evaluation of the Recovery and Resilience Plan for Italy
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Research has clearly demonstrated that two years of the pandemic have hit women the hardest and slowed down their path to gender equality (the so-called SheCession), while the spill-overs of the war in Ukraine and the subsequent economic crisis might further worsen the situation in future.
It is therefore important to evaluate the Gender Impact of the EU Recovery and Resilience Facility, a huge effort by the European Union (EU) to recover from the pandemic and significantly improve the EU’s competitiveness and sustainability.
Italy will receive the highest share of the EU Recovery Fund, € 191.5 billion, since it was worst affected by the pandemic in Europe at every level. Despite being a member of the G7, in terms of Gender Equality Italy is ranked 14th at EU level and 63rd at global level.
This contradiction is not only a human rights concern, but also a severe limit on economic and social development, since the connection between gender equality and GDP growth has been well proven in literature.
This report, therefore, aims to evaluate the gender impact of the Italian Resilience and Recovery Plan (IT RRP) in view of three possible scenarios: the possibility that this facility may worsen the current gender gap in Italy; that it may restore the gender gap that existed before the pandemic; or rather that it may significantly reduce it with real advances on the situation before the pandemic.
Three different methodologies were taken in consideration for this purpose.
In the first, the Italian Ministry of Finance’s Gender impact evaluation (MEF, 2021) reports that “.. the Plan involves activity sectors characterized by a prevalence of male workers (according to 2019 data) for about 79.8% of resources, while sectors in which the share of female employment prevails refer to just over 18% of resources”.
In the second, the so-called Frey methodology (Frey R. 2021), the gender impact from the employment perspective is estimated at 86.6% of investments expected to create or secure employment mainly for men, 3.6% of the investment projects mainly for women, and 8.7% on both men and women.
The third methodology, an adaptation of the Performance-oriented Gender budgeting methodology (Sharp R. 2003), provides different time perspectives, but confirms the overall results of the previous two.
