TERAMO. The horizon of gender equality, towards which society seems to want to row, completely crumbles when reality erupts with its ancient load of prejudices and discrimination. A reality in the world of work that considers pregnancy an obstacle and a woman of childbearing age a potential risk for the company. So it happens that an engineer is not hired because she is pregnant and a good employee has to guarantee not to have children in order to get a career boost. Two distinct episodes that occurred in the Teramo area a few days apart and made known by the CISL which give a measure of how long and uphill the cultural and entrepreneurial journey that must be made in terms of women’s rights and the right to work is.
The first case concerns Monica (not her real name), 30 years old, an engineer in an inland company where, however, she is about to conclude her professional career in conjunction with the end of the projects linked to the Superbonus. A few weeks ago Monica therefore began looking for a new job: her CV was immediately taken into consideration by a large and solid company from Teramo. The woman has the right qualifications, the necessary experience and the job interview ends with the verbal guarantee of hiring. The engineer discovers, a few days after that interview, that she is expecting a child: driven by a sense of fairness and responsibility, she communicates her condition to the company where she was supposed to start working, getting a response with “best wishes: see you in a year.” and a half”. No more employment. “An unacceptable discrimination,” he comments Marco Boccanera, trade unionist of the Fim Cisl of Teramo, «a qualified and trained professional who was liquidated because she reported that she was pregnant. It’s incredible that such correct behavior is rewarded by a high-level company in this way. Pregnancy as a problem, as a reason for work marginalization, as an obstacle to a woman’s personal and professional fulfillment. This young woman told me what happened to her through tears”, continues Boccanera, underlining that “today the world of work has changed: technology and smartworking allow new ways of employment, especially for professions like Monica’s. But it is clear that there is strong resistance and old legacies.”
The trade unionist also refers to another recent episode that happened to a woman, already the mother of a child, who had been employed for some time in another Teramo company. «She is a trained, precise and reliable worker. So much so that the owners proposed that she follow a course aimed at career advancement as long as it gives guarantees of not having a second child”, says Boccanera, “this worker doesn’t know if she intends to have a second child or not, but the blackmail to which she was subjected pushed her to immediately reject the proposal. And we are back on the point of rights: women do not have the right to motherhood. This is a fact. Because if they choose to become mothers too often they are prevented from working, from progressing, from growing: the serious thing is that these problems are occurring with ever greater frequency. Women’s rights are backward: steps are being taken backwards and it is alarming”, concludes Boccanera.
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