Maybe not now.....

Last weekend’s Women’s March, bearing the slogan ‘If not now, when?’ was highly successful. It is perhaps a symptom of the problem that no one, not even the protagonists themselves, expected the ladies to put so many people (many say a million) in the squares and streets of Italy. More demonstrations are planned.

So, have we got a burgeoning, Tahrir Sq type of movement here?

I think focus is the first issue they have to address. For many, that focus is Silvio Berlusconi: his bunga-bunga parties, his cheap television, his objectification of women. The guy is a bit of a dinosaur on the equalities front, but there again he is in his mid 70s; if your political instincts are formed in your mid twenties, that would have been in the early 1960s, and ‘the sixties’ largely passed Italy by.

And Berlusconi will point to the fact that he has appointed many women to government and party posts – enlightened, no? As the lawyer and MP Giulia Bongiorno points out ‘it is the method of selection we are complaining about’. And Italian TV has always been awful.

Sometimes known as ‘the land that feminism forgot’ Italy has a number of issues here which are nothing to do with Berlusconi, except inasmuch as he possibly had the power to change them a bit. More women graduate than men, and with better grades, but only 50% of female graduates have a job; despite making up a fifth of government ministers (thank you, Silvio) they make up around a fifteenth of directors of public companies. In Italy women are only half as likely as men to become legislators, managers and entrepreneurs (source Eurostat, other figures from ISTAT). These figures show not just a glass ceiling, they show tradition, lack of awareness as much as lack of opportuity.

My view is that when Berlusconi goes (and it might be any time between now and the 2013 elections, I can’t really see him staying on after that) he, or rather Berlusconism, will fall farther than many expect. It will be easy to enact a constitutional measure about ownership of the media and easy to shine a little light into the operations of the executive, and it will be easy to have someone monogamous in the top job.

But whether that will change much for women is another matter. And if they get rid of the Great Evil and things are still the same, well, that will be embarrassing.