Study, work, resign. This seems to be the parable of thousands of Italian women who every year are forced to leave their jobs to dedicate themselves to their family and children. The annual report on the validation of resignations and consensual resolutions of working mothers and working fathers of the National Labor Inspectorate speaks clearly: in the last year analysed, 2024, over 62 thousand people left their jobs and of these, 70% are women.
The female influence on contractual resolutions drops drastically with advancing age. In the younger age groups the gap is clear: under 24 years of age women represent 84.6% of validations, in the 24-29 age group 80.4%, between 29 and 34 years 74.8%. The percentage drops to 32.4% over 44 years of age. A clear signal that those leaving the labor market are women of reproductive age and with children, not workers in general.
Why mothers resign: child care versus work organization
Balancing childcare with paid employment proves impossible. Of over 38,000 total discharges linked to treatment difficulties, 94% concern women. A number that alone says it all. The reasons are twofold and reinforce each other: on the one hand the lack of accessible services, with nursery schools expensive or difficult to obtain; on the other, a world of work that is still poorly equipped, where almost half of those who resign explicitly cite the incompatibility between company hours and policies and the needs of caring for their children.
The result is that women are faced with a choice that shouldn’t exist: career or family. And in the vast majority of cases, in the absence of real alternatives, they choose (or are forced to choose) the second.
Part-time as a survival solution
Many women are forced to choose part-time in order to continue working. According to the Cnel-ISTAT 2025 Report on women’s work between obstacles and opportunities, of the total number of employed people, 31.5% of women work part-time, compared to 8.1% of men. In the 25-54 age group, only 6.6% of men work part time, compared to 31.3% of employed women. The percentage drops further (4.6%) in the presence of children, while among mothers it rises significantly (36.7%). This is then reflected in female employment which stops at 53.3%, compared to 71.1% for men and then in salaries and pensions.
How much it really costs to have a child: the child penalty
The INPS 2025 Annual Report offers the most up-to-date snapshot of what the economic literature calls child penalty, the fall in income and presence on the labor market that affects mothers after the birth of a child. A phenomenon that has no male equivalent: for fathers the opposite principle applies, the so-called child premiumwith earnings trajectories that improve after the birth of a child, regardless of how many they have.
For mothers the picture is more complex and depends heavily on how many children they have. Those who have only one manage to fully recover the salary shock by the third year. Those who have two take up to the fourth year. Those who have three or more, in the fifth year after the first birth, still suffer a penalty: each new pregnancy adds a new drop on the income curve, making the recovery path increasingly long and discontinuous.
The age at which you become a mother also matters. Those under 35 suffer an initially smaller income penalty and, if they remain on the market, recover more quickly. But their risk of leaving work in the year of birth is almost double that of those over 35: 25% versus 12%. For younger women, in other words, the penalty is expressed above all in terms of permanence in the world of work, not just salary.
Nursery schools: few places, prohibitive costs and North-South divide
Behind resignations and part-time jobs there is often a concrete calculation: that of the availability and cost of a place in nursery school, which is fundamental to being able to continue working. And the numbers say that, for many families, that place simply isn’t there. In the 2023-2024 educational year, nursery schools in Italy reached 14,570, for a total of approximately 378,500 places available. An encouraging result on paper, but with an important clarification: of these places, only one in five is offered by public structures. The rest is private, and therefore full payment for families who cannot find a place in municipal nurseries.
The national coverage rate has reached 31.6%, but the average hides a clear territorial gap: some provinces in Central Italy such as Bologna, Ravenna and Perugia approach or exceed 50%, while in the South and in Sicily coverage stops between 19 and 19.5%. The same gap which, not surprisingly, is found in female employment rates: lower exactly where services are lacking. The European objective set in 2022 is 45% coverage by 2030, a goal that remains distant for Italy. This is confirmed by the waiting list: in 2023-2024 almost 60% of nurseries did not have enough places to satisfy all the requests.
Parental leave: Italy pays little and fathers don’t use it
On the leave front, the picture is that of a system that is still highly unbalanced. Maternity leave lasts five months at 80% of salary, compulsory paternity leave stops at 10 days at 100%, introduced on an experimental basis in 2012 with just one day, progressively extended up to the current figure. The optional parental leave, which can be used by both parents up to the child’s 12th birthday within a limit of 11 months, has been strengthened recently: the 2023 and 2024 budget laws have increased the allowance to 80% for two months’ salary within the child’s sixth year of life, but only for private employees.
However, the INPS numbers reveal who really uses these tools. In 2024, over 289,000 women benefited from parental leave in the private sector, compared to 124,000 men. And the mothers enjoyed an average of 53 days, more than double the 22 of the fathers. The reforms have increased the number of fathers using them, but have not substantially shifted either the duration or the gender gap.
Precisely to change this balance, a bill on equal leave was presented to the Chamber, which aimed to increase paternity leave from 10 days to five months, largely compulsory and 100% paid. The Budget Commission rejected it due to lack of coverage: the estimated cost was 3.18 billion in 2026 alone. The issue, at least formally, was not political but accounting. In essence, however, the rejection has postponed to a later date the only structural instrument capable of redistributing the care load and reducing the employment penalty of mothers.
What is there and what is missing: the measures in place
The Meloni government tried to intervene with a series of tools that overlapped and were rewritten every year. The mothers bonus, introduced in 2024 as a total contribution exemption of up to 3,000 euros for mothers of three children with a permanent contract, in 2025 became a one-off contribution of a maximum of 480 euros. In 2026 the amount rose to 720 euros, but the promised partial contribution exemption was postponed for the second consecutive year.
The 2026 budget law adds some marginal measures: priority to part-time for those with three children, parental leave extended up to the child’s 14th birthday. This, however, does not solve the problem. Italy allocates approximately 6% of welfare spending to family and childhood, compared to 11.2% in Germany and 10.3% in Finland. As long as services are lacking, as long as paternity leave remains symbolic and as long as policies are rewritten year after year without a structural vision, the cost of motherhood will continue to fall almost entirely on women.
