so the Pnrr forgets women and young people – Corriere.it

Everything seemed perfect. Everything remained perfectly on paper. The laws have changed, Italy hasn’t: women and young people remain in their place, largely outside the world of work even in the new projects of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan. It shouldn’t have gone like this, in theory, because the Plan was born in Brussels precisely to face the most ancient evils. Italy, for example, has the lowest female employment rate in the European Union and the highest proportion of young people who do not study, do not work and are not in training: imbalances so evident that remedying them is one of the official objectives of the Recovery. The launch of the contracts was preceded by a law, dated November 2021, which obliges companies applying for tenders to hire at least 30% of women or young people in order to be able to execute the contracts. As for gender equality, it has become an official goal at Mission 5 of the Pnrr: Entry into force of the gender equality certification system by December 2022. Thus the law was approved in time between the 55 reforms of the second half of last year and now companies that practice gender equality will, in theory, have higher scores to compete in the tenders of the Plan.

Restrictions for hiring women and young people only in 29% of contracts

But the documents agreed with Brussels and the deep moods of society live, for now, in different galaxies. The analysis of the data on over 34,000 tenders launched for the creation of the Pnrr shows that the constraints on the hiring of women and young people are actually requested by contractors only in 29% of cases. As for the rewards in accessing Pnrr tenders for companies with gender equality certification, in 95% of cases it is not foreseen (99% in minor tenders). Thus the Plan sets the goal of certifying equal treatment between women and men at least a thousand companies within three years, but that diploma risks proving to be useless.

The loophole of exceptions

Barbara Martini, professor of statistical models for the economy at the Tor Vergata University in Rome, sifted through about 34,000 notices on the databases that the Anti-Corruption Authority shared with Open Polis. A disconcerting picture emerges, also because it is completely legal. Neither the contracting authorities nor the contractor companies are violating the law in ignoring any requirement of equal opportunities for young people and women. true, for example, that law 108 of 2021, approved in the summer of that year to launch the Pnrr, provides for the so-called conditionality: the body that writes a tender to implement a Pnrr project must indicate that, for the winner, the commitment to employ 30% of women and young people is a necessary requirement. But the same law grants exceptions for such vague and ambiguous reasons (objectives of sociality, efficiency, cost-effectiveness and quality of service) that Pnrr contractors have slipped en masse into the leak. And the exception in Italy has become the rule.

Constraints ignored even by famous contractors

In tenders worth up to 744 thousand euros, just 25% of the contracting authorities maintain the requirement in favor of women and young people. And even in the most important tenders it resists only in just over half of the tenders, even when it comes to providing professional services and not guaranteeing heavy work on construction sites. Among the contractors who ignore the conditions there are also famous names: Ztema (a company of the Municipality of Rome for the culture sector), Tim on some design and construction management services or Trenitalia on a sixty million euro contract for the supply of ten trains . Surely in some sectors women are more difficult to find – concedes Martiti -. But in Engineering Management at my university, they are about half of the student body. And young engineers are certainly not lacking. Not before they go abroad, at least.