Italy’s Hidden Entrepreneurs: How Women Quietly Drove the Economy for a Century

Read new in study in Business History by Giacomo Gabbuti and Stefania Licini https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2025.2511199

Using two sources that had never been combined for this purpose—population censuses and Chamber of Commerce rolls—the authors reconstruct the role of businesswomen over a full century.

Women made up between 20% and 30% of independent workers in Italy from 1901 to 2001, and that share remained surprisingly stable over time.