The so-called ‘inactive’ are people who are not in the labour force, they are those who are not working and are not looking for a job. They also include people who say they are ‘discouraged’, that is, they are not looking for work because they are convinced they cannot find it.

How many are they in the municipality of Milan compared to the regional and Italian context? The inactivity rate for men and women in Milan tends to be lower than the other territorial levels in the graph (province, region, North-West and Italian average).

For women the inactivity rate remains higher than for men, but while for the latter the rate has fluctuated between 22% and 18% in the period 2004-2021, for women there has been a downward trend, at least until 2019, when it probably started to rise slightly again also because of the pandemic.

How to foster the employment of the inactive and discouraged people?

The female inactivity rate is linked to all those economic, social, institutional and cultural factors that make women the main ‘care givers’: the people who take care of non-self-sufficient family members (e.g. children, the elderly, people with disabling illnesses).