Quando le farfalle mettono le ali. Osservazioni sull'ingresso delle donne nel lavoro dipendente

The entrance of young people in the labour market at older ages than in the past is correlated to the increased trend in education. Both these changes, the delay in entrances and the increase in the number of years spent at school, are much more marked in the case of women. One additional school year has a larger return in the case of women than in the case of men as a better education is associated with the possible choice of a job ‘nice, clean and respectable’, and this is more relevant for women than for men, in particular in the Veneto small firms milieu, and because education performs an ‘insurance’ role which palys a major role in the case of women. The study is based on a longitudinal panel built on the Italian Social Security Archives of employees in the two provinces of Treviso and Vicenza from 1975 to 1997. Such a huge set of data allows the study of first entrances of young people in the labour market. First entrances are studied for age and year of birth cohorts and are meaningfully correlated with parameters relative to the enrollment trend in primary and secondary education. The different gender behaviour is underlined and discussed