Italian women take more top jobs, but many have no job at all

ENRICO LETTAPDPDPD, a former prime minister who returned from the political wilderness to lead Italy’s centre-left Democratic Party (), is one of Italy’s more courteous politicians. Yet in one respect he has acted ruthlessly since being elected leader on March 14th. Having named a woman as one of his two deputies and given women eight of the 16 seats in the ’s executive, he forced out its male chief whips in both houses of parliament so that women could be appointed to replace them.Mr Letta’s uncharacteristic purge came as a well-judged response to an outcry that followed his predecessor’s decision to put men into all three of the ministerial places allotted to the in Mario Draghi’s coalition government. The indignant clamour was a sign of changed expectations in a country that, back in the 1970s, had one of Europe’s most militant and successful feminist movements, but which then lost ground dramatically in terms of equality for women.