Edilizia al femminile, la sfida parte dal cuore della Sicilia

Part of a momentum the campaign that Ance Enna has conceived and promoted to encourage young women to embark on a path of integration into construction companies. This sector, construction, employs only 9% of the female workforce in Italy.

The causes are not related to ability, but to cultural barriers, poor visibility of female professional role models, and a perception of the sector still exclusively linked to heavy manual labor. The campaign by Network PargEn aims to show the normality of a professional choice based on competence, innovation, and concrete career prospects.

"Bringing women into construction companies is a challenge we must face, aware of the cultural legacies we need to overcome - says Vincenzo Talio, entrepreneur at the head of a group of over 250 employees specialized in civil railway works, who has recently taken over Ance Enna -. Today, the women working in our companies are mostly employed in administrative sectors, while we face a dual challenge: the disruptive growth of technologies on site and the lack of young people to employ. Our commitment is to grow skills and I am sure that women will also contribute effectively." Gaetano Debole, president of the Cassa e scuola edile di Enna, echoes him: "With the unions, we will evaluate every possible training path useful to promote the growth of female presence in our sector. We believe that some technical operational skills can find consensus. I think of operating construction machinery, digital management of the site, and areas of sustainability."

Regional data in Sicily indicate that employment in construction has grown by 15.2%, the best national performance among the main regions, well above the Italian average (+4.8%) and the South (+9.2%). According to Formedil data, the female students enrolled in training courses in Italy in 2022 were 9,004, more than doubled compared to 4,007 in 2020, and represent 32% of the total enrolled in construction schools. In particular, the number of women enrolled in courses for workers increased from 700 in 2020 to 1,574 in 2022.

Sabrina Burgarello, past president of Ance Enna and proponent of the network, who runs the family business, comments: "Being entrepreneurs in the construction sector is a commitment we face every day without regard to gender. In our small way, our technical and administrative staff are predominantly female. We hope in the coming years to also train specialized technicians in our sector. From an entrepreneurial perspective, when in 2017 my colleagues honored me with the presidency of Ance in Italy, we were just 2 female presidents, shortly after Federica Brancaccio was elected head of Ance national. Today, representation is growing."

Confartigianato: in the island strong gender dynamism

The Sicilian economic landscape in 2025 showed signs of strong dynamism in the female independent work sector, which grew by 3 percent in the first nine months of the year, bringing the number of self-employed women to 95,000. This is what emerges from data analyzed by the Women’s Enterprise movement of Confartigianato Sicilia, which emphasizes how this momentum is reflected in a productive fabric that counts 113,245 female-led businesses, accounting for 24.4% of the total, of which 11,139 are artisan realities mainly active in personal services, food, and catering. A significant figure concerns generational change and inclusion, with 11.7% of these artisan businesses led by young people under 35 and 7.1% by foreign women. Results that consolidate the trend of 2024, the year in which Sicily reached the historic maximum of the female employment rate at 37.3%, while remaining in eighteenth place in the national ranking with a persistent gender gap of 26.3 percentage points compared to men. At the provincial level, in 2024, Ragusa 49.4% led the island, followed by Enna 39.9%, Messina 38.4%, Catania 37.7%, and Palermo 37%, the province that records the smallest gender gap of 23.5 points. Agrigento 36.9%, Trapani 36.7%, and Siracusa 36% show intermediate values, while Caltanissetta 29.2% closes the ranking with the lowest rate and the most marked male-female gap on the island, equal to 33.3 percentage points.