Gender gap

In this article, I learned a lot about the gender gap that takes place in Italy even today. Prior to this trip, I've always known western and central Europe for being very politically progressive, both socially and economically.  What came to my surprise in reading this article, was finding out that Italy is ranked 80th for their gender gap index.

I was amazed and saddened to hear that in Italy, only 20% of Parliament are women as of 2015, and that even though women get more degrees then men do in Italy, men have a higher chance of getting management positions, getting promoted, hired, and being paid 20%-25% higher than a woman in the same job.

When initially reading this article, I attempted to look back on my travels in Venice so far to see if I missed any gender gap-based observations.  One thing I noticed overall, is that it seems to be that men are mainly working compared to women, and if I see a woman working, they seemed to be inside doing some sort of office work.

I personally believe that addressing this issue and promoting awareness can help fix this issue.  This can be done in schools and through politics.  I think a motivator that we can see would be higher productivity, because women would become more motivated to get management positions as well as becoming political leaders.  If productivity increased in Italy as a whole, we can see their GDP rise in a number of years, which would help the European Union, especially since they'll lose the revenue from the United Kingdom.