Italy vs. Portugal: One Signs Away Her Own Resignation, the Other Just Quietly Underpays Her

🇮🇹 Italy · 🇵🇹 Portugal

*By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

For years, some Italian employers had new female hires sign an undated resignation letter on their first day — filed away, ready to be dated and submitted the moment the employee announced a pregnancy. The practice, known as "dimissioni in bianco," was significant enough that Italy eventually had to legislate against it. Portugal has no equivalent scandal. It simply pays women 72% employment-rate-adjusted parity to men's 79%, calls it a day, and lets the gap quietly compound over a career instead.

Do's & Don'ts

🇮🇹 Italy

🇵🇹 Portugal

Italy

Italy's headline gender pay gap looks, on paper, like one of the best in Europe: 5.6% overall, among the lowest in the EU. The trick is that the number is flattered by how few women are in the workforce at all — Italy's female economic activity rate is 35.3%, against 60.5% for men, the lowest participation rate in the OECD, where the average is 51%. The women who do stay in paid work and climb into management hit a very different number: a 34.7% pay gap, more than six times the national average, and among women in tech specifically, managers earn roughly €33.6 an hour against €46.2 for men, according to Eurofound and sector data. Sixteen percent of Italian women leave the workforce entirely after maternity leave, compared with 2.8% of men, despite statutory leave that guarantees roughly 80% of wages for five months.

Culturally, Hofstede Insights scores Italy at 70 on Masculinity, reflecting a competitive, achievement-oriented office culture where visible ambition is rewarded — for those still in the room to be rewarded. The "dimissioni in bianco" practice, undated resignation letters collected preemptively so employers could fire pregnant employees without a paper trail, was widespread enough to prompt specific anti-fraud legislation; Italy has also debated formal menstrual leave, a policy proposal that made international headlines without ever quite becoming standard practice.

Portugal

Portugal's numbers are less dramatic and, arguably, more honest about where the gap actually sits. The employment rate for people aged 20–64 is 72% for women against 79% for men — a 7-point gap that Eurostat notes is narrower than the EU average. Part-time work splits 13% women to 8% men, a modest and largely voluntary-looking gap rather than a structural exit ramp. On the EU's own Gender Equality Index, Portugal scores 59.9 out of 100, landing 16th among EU member states — solidly mid-table, improving, unremarkable in either direction.

Hofstede's dimensions back up the tonal difference: Portugal scores low on Masculinity and low on Individualism, indicating a more consensus-driven, group-oriented office culture than Italy's competitive style. In InterNations' 2026 Expat Insider rankings, Portugal placed 8th overall among all destinations worldwide, prized for ease of settling in — a marked contrast with Italy's 44th-place finish, weighed down by bureaucracy complaints and pay dissatisfaction (29% of expats in Italy don't feel fairly paid, against a 20% global average).

The Reckoning

The two countries arrive at similar-looking overall numbers by opposite routes. Italy achieves a deceptively low headline pay gap by simply not employing as many women in the first place, then opens a canyon-sized gap the moment those women reach management. Portugal has a wider raw employment gap but a flatter, more consistent one across seniority levels — less dramatic, less newsworthy, and arguably less punishing for anyone who actually wants a long career.

For an incoming employee, the practical upshot is this: Italy's system rewards women who get in and climb fast, before the structural drop-off after childbirth; Portugal's system offers a gentler, more even slope with a lower ceiling in ambition-signaling but fewer catastrophic cliffs.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Blind (Women in Tech) — A commenter responding to "How has taking maternity affected your career?" described returning from leave in Italy to find her project reassigned and her manager "surprised" she still wanted to be on the promotion track, framing it not as hostility but as a genuine assumption that motherhood had settled the question for her.

Quora — Someone describing daily life for women in Portugal noted that overt sexism was rarer among younger colleagues but still common among older men in leadership, particularly around assumptions of who would naturally take time off for family matters.

Internations — An expat weighing offers in both countries wrote that Italy's bureaucracy — opening a bank account, registering residency — ended up mattering more to her day-to-day stress than the workplace culture itself, and that this administrative friction disproportionately fell on her since her Italian partner's family handled most "insider" paperwork by phone calls she wasn't part of.

Reddit (r/AskEurope) — One respondent who had worked in Italy described watching colleagues use their legally protected parental leave only to return to what she called "professionally marginal" roles — technically the same title, quietly stripped of the clients or projects that mattered — and said no orientation ever mentioned that the real risk wasn't losing the job, it was losing the job that mattered.

Conclusion

If you're a woman weighing these two moves, the honest framing is: Italy can reward you generously and quickly if you climb before you have children, or if you don't plan to; Portugal offers a more level, less thrilling trajectory that's harder to get excited about and easier to actually live inside for twenty years. Neither is quietly a nightmare and neither is quietly solved — that's the part that never makes the relocation packet. The line I'd give a friend: in Italy, watch the fine print before you sign anything; in Portugal, watch the ceiling, because it's lower than the smiling recruiter will admit.