Women's Trajectories in Italian Cooperatives. All that glitters is not gold

In Italy, cooperative organisations are well developed and extremely important for the national economy. Although they are capitalist en-terprises, they are based on democratic and mutualist principles, which (at a theoretical level) have facilitated the inclusion of women. The paper focuses on the employment of women in Italian cooperative organisations. By analysing secondary national data from the Italian Commercial Register, contents from semi-structured interviews with experts and interviews with cooperative workers in three different productive sectors, we investigate three dimensions of women’s employment: horizontal and vertical labour segregation and the gender pay gap. The research shows that although the level of female employment in the sector is higher than in the capitalist organisations, vertical and horizontal segregation, combined with the fact that women work less due to the massive spread of part-time contracts, still contribute to a significant gender pay gap.