Working time and gender inequalities in Italy - Years 2003-2023

In 2023, the time women spend on unpaid domestic and care work has fallen compared with twenty years earlier (-37 minutes per day, -12.4% compared with 2003).

Among employed women, the time spent on paid work increased by 1 hour 33 minutes per week compared with 2003.

In the European comparison, Italy records the widest gender gap both in unpaid domestic and care work and in paid work.

The rebalancing of unpaid domestic and care workloads between women and men is proceeding very slowly: the gender gap in time devoted to domestic and care work narrowed from 3 hours 22 minutes per day in 2003 to 2 hours 27 minutes in 2023.

Among employed people aged 25-64 living as a couple, women spend 2 hours and 22 minutes more per day than men on housework and care. The gap is particularly large in the presence of children and in Southern Italy.

About two and a half hours’ difference between women and men in unpaid domestic and care work

Across the population aged 15 years and over, the gender gap in daily unpaid domestic and care work narrowed by around 55 minutes over the twenty years, from 3 hours 22 minutes in 2003 to 2 hours 27 minutes in 2023. This represents significant progress (-27.2% in twenty years), which nevertheless leaves women with a workload that is still well over double that of men (4 hours 21 minutes against 1 hour 54 minutes). The narrowing of the gender gap came mainly from the reduction in the time women spend on domestic and care work, associated with women’s greater participation in paid work and helped by the spread of technology and household appliances (Istat, 2026). However, differences in participation in paid work do not on their own explain the gender gap: even in couples where both partners are employed, women still perform 68.9% of the total domestic and care work.

Unpaid domestic and care work shows a similar age profile for men and women, but with very different intensity: the time devoted to it increases from childhood to adulthood and decreases in the older age groups. Gender differences, already visible among children and teenagers (10 minutes in 2023), widen progressively with age and reach their highest values in the midlife, when childcare, housekeeping and participation in the labour market are concentrated together. In 2023, in the 45-64 age group, women spend almost 3 hours more than men on domestic and care work (2 hours 55 minutes). In the 25-44 age group the gap is slightly smaller (2 hours 49 minutes). At this stage of life, the time women devote to domestic and care work exceeds 4 hours a day, while that of men is around an hour and a half.

Over twenty years the gap has narrowed in all age groups. In adulthood this reduction came mainly from the contraction of women’s time: women aged 25-44 spend about 50 minutes less on domestic and care work than in 2003, those aged 45-64 about 70 minutes less. The time men in the same age groups devote to domestic and care work has instead remained substantially stable, with a slight increase between 2003 and 2013 and substantial stabilisation in the following decade. This pattern is partly attributable to the employment crisis of 2008-2014, which temporarily reduced men’s paid working time, increasing the time available to them for domestic work.

In the older age groups the mechanism behind the narrowing of the gap is partly different. Among those aged 65-74, the time women devote to domestic and care work remains almost unchanged over the years (from 5 hours 51 minutes to 5 hours 40 minutes), while that of men increases significantly (from 2 hours 45 minutes to 3 hours 8 minutes): it is therefore the increase in men’s contribution, favoured by their exit from the labour market, that brings the two closer. Among those aged 75 and over, on the other hand, women’s times increase (from 3 hours 51 minutes to 4 hours 11 minutes), as do men’s (from 2 hours 6 minutes to 2 hours 36 minutes), so that the gender gap remains substantially stable. The growing domestic and care workload at this stage of life also reflects the intensification of mutual care between elderly partners, in a population that is ageing and living longer, but in a context in which health conditions are gradually improving, making older people more self-sufficient.

Female employment and unpaid work: Italy lags the Nordic countries

Among the 12 European countries that have conducted the Time Use Survey in recent years, Italy stands out for a double gender asymmetry that has no equal.

The first concerns paid work: with a female employment rate among those aged 15-64 of 52.5%, in 2023 Italy ranks last among European Union countries, more than 13 percentage points below the average (65.7%), with one of the widest gender gaps (-17.9 percentage points compared with men). Despite the progress made in recent years (+6.3 percentage points compared with 2013), which is nonetheless smaller than in most other countries, women’s employment levels remain significantly lower than men’s (Source: Eurostat, Labour Force Survey). Consistent with low female employment rates, women aged 15 and over spend 1 hour 48 minutes on paid work in an average weekly day, the lowest value among the countries observed; Italy also shows the widest gender gap in paid work: men spend 1 hour 40 minutes more on it than women, ahead of Serbia (1 hour 25 minutes; Figure 1).

The second asymmetry concerns women’s unpaid domestic and care work (women aged 15 and over, excluding help to non-cohabiting relatives), with the highest value among the countries observed: 4 hours 15 minutes per day. The result is a gender gap in domestic and care work of 2 hours 26 minutes, almost three times that recorded in the Nordic countries: in Norway and Finland the difference between men and women is only 49 and 50 minutes respectively.

Among the countries with the narrowest gender gaps in domestic and care work, besides the already mentioned Norway and Finland, are the Netherlands (58 minutes) and Germany and Estonia (1 hour 8 minutes). In these countries the smaller asymmetry in domestic and care work is generally accompanied by a greater female presence in paid work: women work more hours outside the home and fewer at home. The rebalancing of family workloads, however, does not necessarily depend on greater female commitment to paid work: in Germany, for example, women spend on average 1 hour 59 minutes a day on paid work, not much more than Italian women (1 hour 48 minutes), while men spend 2 hours 10 minutes on domestic and care work, against 1 hour 49 minutes for Italian men: the smaller gap is therefore explained above all by men’s greater contribution, not by a substantial increase in women’s hours of paid work.

Looking at total work (paid and unpaid), the widest gap is found in Bulgaria, where women work a total of 1 hour 13 minutes more than men, compared with 46 minutes in Italy. In Italy, by contrast, the two asymmetries add up and reinforce each other, appearing together at their highest levels: women do far more domestic and care work than men and far less paid work, and are thus penalised at the same time in terms of economic autonomy and the sharing of domestic workloads.

Less housework, more paid work: the workload of employed women is changing

While the international comparison, albeit limited to a few countries, shows Italy as an extreme case in gender gaps in daily domestic and care work, the data on total weekly work give a more nuanced picture, in which employment status becomes the key variable for understanding how workloads are distributed and how they have changed over the last twenty years.

Among employed men, the contraction in working time clearly shows the impact of the economic crisis: between 2003 and 2013 the time spent on paid work fell by about an hour and a half per week (from 43 hours 15 minutes to 41 hours 41 minutes), while the time spent on unpaid domestic and care work rose by almost 2 hours (from 8 hours 27 minutes to 10 hours 24 minutes), in a partial substitution effect between the two spheres (Figure 2, right). With the employment recovery of the following decade, the time spent on paid work returned to pre-crisis levels (43 hours 5 minutes in 2023), but the time spent on domestic and care work did not fully revert: it stands at 10 hours 33 minutes per week, about 2 hours above 2003. This is a modest but indicative sign of a transformation in male behaviour.

For employed women the change is sharper and points in a clear direction: over twenty years the time spent on paid work has grown by about an hour and a half (from 31 hours 52 minutes to 33 hours 25 minutes per week), while the time spent on domestic and care work has fallen by more than 3 hours per week (from 27 hours 23 minutes to 23 hours 54 minutes). As a result, the total work time (domestic/care and paid) of employed women has fallen by almost 2 hours per week, from 59 hours 14 minutes to 57 hours 19 minutes (Figure 2, left).

The improvement for employed women is real, but must be put in perspective: with almost 13 hours per week more of domestic and care work than employed men, the female overload remains a structural feature.

Housewives show a different profile: domestic and care work falls (from 52 hours 51 minutes in 2003 to 49 hours 33 minutes in 2023; -6.2% over twenty years), thanks also to improvements in household appliance ownership and changes in consumption habits (for example the spread of ready meals and online shopping), which have helped reduce the time needed for household activities (Istat, 2026). However, levels remain very high, almost 50 hours per week in 2023, confirming that exclusion from the labour market often translates into an almost full-time commitment to domestic and care work.

Looking at the population as a whole, and not only at those who work, the rebalancing between men and women in total weekly work is under way, but slowly: among men, total work time has risen to 42 hours 16 minutes in 2023 (from 41 hours 14 minutes in 2003), while among women it has fallen to 46 hours 30 minutes (from 49 hours 19 minutes), reducing the overall gap to just over 4 hours per week.

Parents under pressure: work never ends, but it is not the same for everyone

Among employed people, the composition of total work varies considerably with the role held in the family, but it is the gender difference that defines the most marked profile. Overall, employed women devote 41.7% of their total work time to domestic and care work, against 19.7% for men (Figure 3, left). The gap widens further among parents: domestic and care work absorbs 48.8% of mothers’ work time and only 22.3% of fathers’. For employed mothers, almost one hour of work in two is unpaid domestic and care work: a distribution that reflects a strongly asymmetric division of roles, regardless of participation in the labour market.

The gender asymmetry in the distribution of work does not, however, depend exclusively on family structure. Even among people living alone, women devote 32.5% of their total work to domestic and care work against 21.1% for men. The asymmetry therefore reflects different models of domestic care between the sexes irrespective of the formation of a family, and is thus not reducible to the division of roles within the couple alone.

The quality-of-life indicators give a more nuanced picture (Figure 3, right). Work overload, defined as performing more than 60 hours of total work per week, affects high shares of employed people of both sexes (50.8% of men and 54.6% of women). Gender differences emerge more strongly in the indicators of time poverty (13.9% of men, 23.2% of women) and stress (20.0 against 28.1%), indicators that do not measure the hours actually worked, but the subjective perception of the availability of time and of the difficulty of reconciling the different spheres of life.

Despite similar levels of overload, women more often report perceived stress and insufficient time. In this context, the intertwining of multiple responsibilities among employed women plausibly fosters a perception of greater pressure. Employed men, in fact, concentrate over 80% of their work time in paid activities, so that at the end of the working day the boundary between commitments and free time is sharper. For employed women, by contrast, the end of paid work more often coincides with the start of domestic and care work, with no break and with greater overlap between roles, a condition identified by the international terms role spillover or work-family conflict.

The greatest difficulties are found among employed parents. Mothers reach 62.6% overload, 26.4% time poverty and 30.4% stress; fathers, albeit with lower values, also show the highest peaks among male roles (58.0%, 17.1%, 23.3%). The presence of children is therefore a source of pressure for both sexes, but with significantly different intensity: for mothers, the accumulation of paid and domestic and care work translates into a worse perception of time and well-being.