Gender and productive specialisation. A spatio-temporal analysis for the Italian provinces.

Abstract

The work aims to study the relationship between the rate of growth of employment and the productive specialisation of Italian provinces by including the gender dimension in the analysis. Men and women work in different sectors and, consequently, when faced with an increase in employment, women are more likely to fall into some sectors than others. Using a spatio-temporal Spatial Durbin Model (SDM), our analysis shows that the provinces' productive specialisation is not gender-neutral and the impacts on the labour growth rate are different. This result has important policy implications since, in order to maintain gender equity, policies must not only have the objective of favouring female employment but must also take into account the sector in which women will be employed. Only in this way it will be possible to simultaneously achieve a gender balance and high economic growth.