Abstract for the ‘Opening the Pandora’s Box: Gender and Migration in Italy’

Over the last fifteen years, the number of personal care and private domestic workers in Italy has drastically increased. Demographic and socio economic changes as well as the limited provision of public services have contributed to make this type of occupation a structural part of the current Italian Welfare State. In this analysis, we study the relative pay of personal care and domestic workers and its underlying determinants between 2012 and 2016 in Italy. The data are taken from the Italian Labour Force Survey and used to depict two broader occupational categories used as reference groups against which to compare personal care and domestic workers’ wages. These broader groups are, respectively, skilled professions in sales and services and the elementary occupations. In the first part of the analysis, the relative wage penalty has been estimated using the Heckman correction. The outputs show that in Italy, holding constant individual and job characteristics and adjusting for selection sample bias, personal care and domestic workers earn significantly less than their peers in the respective occupational categories. Moreover, the wage gaps persist and remain constant between 2012 and 2016. In the second part, the Oaxaca – Blinder decomposition has been used in order to explore the determinants of the wage penalty of personal care and domestic workers in2016. There is evidence that, for both personal care and domestic jobs, the wage gap is not entirely explained by observable characteristics. This analysis contributes to the literature on devaluation theory, for which the low wages of personal care and domestic workers are related to the fact that such occupations are culturally devalued and conceived as “female” work, that personal care and domestic activities are performed by workers from the most marginalised segments of the labour force, and that most of the users of these services, such as the elderly and children, have limited purchasing power.