Gender Pay Gap: the results of the UM questionnaire in collaboration with Alfemminile
All About U: Let's talk about women today, together with UM
All About U is the project of international scope, by the UM (Universal McCann) agency that has finally arrived in Italy. The project addresses the issues of inclusion, diversity with the aim of raising awareness and opening the debate on the condition of women contemporary, understood as a worker, as a mother and as a wife.
At the center of the debate of the All About U project there will therefore be different themes regarding the female figure. Let's start today to talk about the condition of women at work, the difficulties of reconciling family and career and of course, the gender pay gap.
The context: woman and work
In recent times, the women's question has once again become very topical in the political debate. This visibility we are talking about, alas, is almost always to be traced back to unfortunate episodes, such as violence, and also to work and social issues, which highlight without half measure how many difficulties, even today, women have to face in order to assert themselves. in the world of work, a world that too often still speaks, thinks and lives "masculine". Work is an area of fragility. Contemporary women are often forced to make enormous sacrifices in the name and on behalf of the family, they are often ostracized if they simply ask for their due, they are laughed at if they are not judged attractive enough. It seems enough but there is more: women are, however, universally and tacitly paid less than their male colleagues.
The Gender Pay Gap is a universal, transversal, international phenomenon that relegates women to a condition of inferiority, and it is not known how and why, to receive a lower salary for the same role compared to a male counterpart. It seems incredible, yet this is what happens in our country. But not only that: women come to fill top positions less easily. They have less careers, they are less promoted. It is therefore no wonder that women, during the pandemic, are the ones who have lost most of their jobs, in the end during this period as on any other occasion, it is the women who (almost always) have to sacrifice themselves. When there is a family choice to make, when they have to give up to allow the partner or husband on duty to make a career. Because the opposite is simply not imaginable.
The stereotypes and behaviors that we can define as clichés are often both on one side and on the other. Women often do not react to this situation, convinced that it is so, that it goes like this and it must necessarily go like this. A cocktail of resignation that not too subtly hides an ancestral relationship with indulgence, with patience and coexistence with stereotypes, which are very familiar, too familiar. It is true that not everyone goes like this: but those who do not like it are considered women with balls (another bad cliché that condemns women to having to homologate to a male characteristic when they excel) or they have simply been lucky. It is certainly not their merit!
What we would like to investigate today is how much women suffer in the workplace. We want to look and analyze the situation and understand if behind the women who passively suffer this situation there is a lack of choice, a little awareness and still a little self-confidence, we want to understand how many of these women accept all this only for a quiet life or because they still don't know that now is the time to say enough is enough.
In recent days, Ursula Von der Leyen returned to talk about the Sofa Gate: "I am the first woman to be president of the European Commission and this is how I expected to be treated during the trip to Turkey, as a president of the Commission. to find justification and I must conclude that what happened happened because I am a woman. "
Discrimination is at all levels and is not a purely Italian thing.
The results of the UM questionnaire
The first insights of our first survey speak to a woman who is on average 43 years old, resident in the North West. 68% of our interviewees work full time and have good work experience (they have been working for at least 18/20 years). In most cases we have interviewed women who have clerical duties, but also doctors, nurses, teachers. They are faithful workers, 74% have changed few places, They have a good opinion of their work, as workers, much higher than what they believe their colleagues have of them.
Speaking of professional satisfaction, 74% say they have a medium-high level of satisfaction. Only 8% say they do a job they don't really like.
Satisfaction, however, does not always go hand in hand with increases and careers, because 35% of our interviewees say they have never had increases or promotions in their professional life. The reason for this is to be found in the lack of meritocracy of the company in which they work (45%), but also in the self-recognition of having had little courage to ask (24%) and therefore the quiet life and low self-esteem often made so that they are satisfied.
As we imagined, family work balance is the biggest challenge to overcome on a daily basis (36%), but also to survive in very competitive workplaces, where respect from colleagues does not seem to be taken for granted (27%).
78% of our women interviewed are aware of the gender pay gap. Some of them, 30% have tried to remedy, asking, but they say they have not been able to get anything.
They are clamoring for greater meritocracy and equal opportunities.
