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The paper proposes an enlargement of the traditional notion of human capital, by conceptualising knowledge in a comprehensive and multidimensional way. In our empirical approach, knowledge encompasses several formal and informal skills, to complement the mainstream view narrowly concerned with education and on-the-job training. Our results for Italy point out that despite much rhetoric about the reduction (or even the reversal) of gender gaps in education, women often lack the main skills and competencies that can profitably be deployed in the labour market. Unsurprisingly, in Italy women’s accumulation of labour market experience is mostly hindered by unpaid housework burdens. However, when adopting an extensive definition of knowledge these activities may be regarded as a source of relevant knowledge. Yet, they do not seem to be positively valued by the market, either in terms of employability or in terms of wages, thus calling for a serious rethinking of the role of knowledge in shaping men’s and women’s economic opportunities.

Patriarchy is an abstract concept; however, its consequences are visible and substantial in society in an endless list of events that mainly affect women’s lives, but do not exclude men’s life experience either. By defining a patriarchy index for Italy—for the first time ever—this article aims at describing patriarchy, from an economic perspective, as a complex aggregate, based on several stereotypes, represented by a series of variables related to behaviours, classified in four domains: the degree of patrilocality, the dominance of men over women, the dominance of older over younger generations, and socio-economic domination. As it is structured, the patriarchy index might complement the more famous Gender Equality Index (GEI), calculated by the European Institute of Gender Equality (EIGE), with a measure that focuses on the ‘invisible’ component of gender inequality. This case study on Italy represents an opportunity to confirm the well-known socio-economic dualism between regions in the North and South from a gender perspective. Regions in the North and Central regions score very close results and show that, although patriarchal stereotypes are still present and strong, patriarchy is becoming minoritarian. On the opposite side, the South still shows strong and majoritarian patriarchal patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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An encyclopaedia of feminist economics was published in 1999 (Peterson and Lewis [5]), and a review of developments during the first ten years of feminist economics was published in 2003 (Ferber and Nelson [3]). Alessandro Roncaglia has given us fundamental reflections on the methodological and conceptual canons that should be the cornerstones of a realistic vision of how economic theories have developed through time. The introduction of a feminist perspective into economic theory during the last two or three decades can be regarded as part of a general project to rethink economics, either as a revised version of neoclassical economics, or as a deep heterodox critique to neoclassical economics. [Extracted from the article]