Freedom of choice and gender gaps in Tuscany: evidence from the data

In recent years, female participation in the labor market has shown signs of improvement in Tuscany, which ranks among the regions with relatively high levels of female employment compared to the national average. However, a more in-depth analysis of the data shows that these advances continue to be accompanied by persistent inequalities, which concern not only access to work, but also the quality of employment, career opportunities, and the distribution of life time.

This note provides an overview of gender inequalities in Tuscany, focusing in particular on the labor market, skills, and factors that affect women’s actual choices. The aim is to reconstruct the structural profile of the gaps, identifying the main critical issues that emerge from the empirical evidence.

The analysis adopts an interpretation of freedom as the effective capacity to choose, according to the capabilities approach developed by Nobel Prize winner Amartia Sen (1985). From this perspective, the gaps observed in the data do not merely represent differences in outcomes, but indicate deeper constraints linked to the material, organizational, and social conditions within which women’s career and life trajectories are situated.

Finally, the note highlights how gender inequalities cannot be interpreted exclusively in binary terms. Age, family status, level of education, and geographical context contribute to producing different experiences within the female world, suggesting the usefulness of a more articulated approach to interpreting the gaps. In this sense, the contribution aims to provide a knowledge base useful for understanding the complexity of the phenomena observed.

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