Italy has the highest rate of individuals Not in Employment, Education or Training (NEET) in Europe, and its NEET has the highest gender bias in Western Europe. A marked heterogeneity, however, accompanies the age sub-groups, and women’s conditions become systematically worse with advancing age. Using data from 2019, we investigate the association between the probability of being NEET and a set of individual and regional (socioeconomic and institutional) characteristics, examining whether and to what extent the role of these determinants varies depending on gender within two distinct age groups: young (15–24) and adult (25–34) NEETs. In general, we find clear evidence that women are at a relative disadvantage compared to men and, as age increases, both positive and negative determinants show relations that tend to weaken for men and to worsen for women. The results of our analyses also suggest that social/family obligations affect men and women differently, to the detriment of women, and that this disparity widens with age. The contrast between the position of men and women within marriage is empirically confirmed and perfectly captured by marginal effects with opposite signs. The policy implications of our analysis are discussed in the concluding section of this paper.

Human capital is a fundamental economic resource in the knowledge economy era, and improvements in education are usually associated with both economic development and the reduction of inequality. In Italy, these relationships are empirically controversial due to structural weaknesses (e.g., low improvements in labour productivity) and a poor capacity to leverage the returns from education. At the same time, the strong North-South dualism in the country suggests that there are inequalities in human capital endowment that may be exacerbated by the different responses of the regions to common problems. We test the effect of labour force human capital in Italy (observed through worker education level) on income inequality in the 2004–2016 period using regional data. The results suggest that the hypothesized mechanism works as expected in the more developed Centre-North, while structural difficulties hamper the reduction of inequality in the South, where, however, social capital plays a positive role in reducing the income inequalities.