Women from Eastern Europe to Italy: Perspectives from the Contemporary Age

In Europe, migrants from Eastern Europe have satisfied the demand for a cheap labour force in low-skill jobs and women have been a significant component of this migration. We shall be presenting the phenomenon from a sociological point of view, analysing the scientific literature on the subject and observing the flows and the migratory features that characterise the population of the four countries which show the highest percentage of female presences in Italy: Romania, Albania, Moldova and Ukraine. The period covered by our research is from the 1990s to 2020, before the major changes triggered by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and ensuing large-scale humanitarian, migration and refugee crises (Cesareo 2023). In the late 1980s, after the dissolution of the communist regimes, the migration from eastern to southern Europe began and then increased enormously in the subsequent decades (King and DeBono 2013). Romanians were the biggest group of EU citizens living in other EU Member States in 2020 (Eurostat 2021). In this chapter, in order to analyse female migration from Eastern Europe to Italy, we shall be focusing on the following questions: How does migration affect individuals and societies? For migrant women, which are the main kinds of intersectional discrimination and how do these discriminations affect them in work segregation and daily relationships in Italy? In the first part of the paper, the theoretical framework of reference and the demographic and economic features of women from the four chosen countries will be presented. In the second part, the characteristics of migrants will be explored by nationality, by referring to official statistical sources such as ISTAT and the Italian Ministry of Labour and Social Policies (ML). The data will be used to provide a description of the situation at the Italian level and to identify specific research areas.