There is a moment, during certain family lunches, when someone – usually sitting comfortably, with all the confidence of someone who has never had to prove anything – explains to you that things are fine. That the situation has improved. That you’re exaggerating. At that point you can answer, make a trembling eye on the threshold of a nervous breakdown, you can raise your voice, you can bring data. Or you can do what the Rag Dolls did in the Lucio Dalla press room of the 2026 Sanremo Festival: respond with a sentence so precise as to make any other comment superfluous.
A journalist had just finished explaining to the Milanese rockers that feminism is old news, that we are in the 1930s, that this contrast is tiring. Evidence brought to support the thesis:
It’s not a patriarchal society, in my house my wife rules.
The girls responded without raising their voices, with that calm that is reserved for things that are not worth shouting:
We don’t want to rule at home, we want power everywhere.
The video spread on social media within a very short time. The journalist, in all likelihood, had already returned to his home, where someone was evidently waiting for him to handle everything else.
“Behind every great man there is a great woman”
In the same press conference, the same journalist decided to strengthen his position with a timeless classic, one of those clichés that come out convinced that they are saying something profound:
“Behind every great man there is a great woman.”
It’s worth stopping here for a moment, because this phrase deserves all the attention it doesn’t usually get. He cited her as an example of how much women matter, of how much their role is recognized and respected.
The Rag Dolls (and anyone who listened with any attention) heard something completely different. They heard a woman positioned behind. Functional to someone else’s success. Invisible by definition, necessary by definition, recognized only in relation to someone else in front. The woman is not the subject of the sentence. It’s the background.
In the post on Instagram published the next day and then removed from the platform for copyright reasons, the girls wrote what many had thought in silence:
This sentence is yet another demonstration of how deeply rooted the idea that a woman should stay behind still is. Behind the success. Behind the power. Behind the voice. The problem is not a cliché. It’s the thought that keeps her standing. Equality means walking together. Not a step back.
Equaly, the first Italian company to deal with gender equality in the music sector, commented on the incident with words that do not leave much room for interpretation: a professional who feels the need to talk about feminism should at least know about it, as he would with any other topic he deals with in his work.
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“My wife is in charge in my house” (trust me): how the system works
The ISTAT report on the structure of salaries, published in January 2025 and relating to the year 2022, is the type of document that is read with that strange sensation of seeing something written in black and white that was already known but which has a different effect when it becomes an official number.
Italian female employees earn on average 6 thousand euros a year less than their male colleagues: 33,807 euros against 39,982. The average hourly wage for women is 15.9 euros, that for men is 16.8. The overall gender pay gap stands at 5.6%, and this figure alone would be enough to answer the journalist.
Except that the most interesting data – the one that really explains the structure of the problem – comes when you look at where the gap is widening. Among managers the gap reaches 30.8%: a manager earns 34.5 euros an hour, a male manager 49.8. Among graduates – those who spent the same years studying, taking the same exams – the gap reaches 16.6%, approximately triple the general average. More education equals more merit, they say. Yet, the math doesn’t add up the same for everyone.
Then there is the data that directly concerns the wife who is in charge at home. Women’s paid hours are 15.1% lower than those of men: on average 1,539 hours per year compared to 1,812. The percentage of part-time female workers in companies with at least 10 employees is more than double that of men: 12.3% versus 5.2%.
Someone has reduced the hours to keep the house, children, care and daily management together. And this someone, in the vast majority of cases, is a woman. The pay of men over 50 compared to younger workers is 65.5% higher. That of women in the same age group stops at 38.6%. Because in the middle of your career, at the age when you build seniority which then makes the difference, something has already happened. A son, a part-time job that seemed temporary, a household management that consolidated in a natural and silent way. And from that moment on, the gap grows and can never be recovered.
A Nobel Prize winner in Economics called this mechanism “greedy work”
Claudia Goldin, a professor at Harvard, has dedicated decades to studying exactly what the ISTAT numbers photograph in Italy. In 2023 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for this research. The heart of his work has a name that says it all: “greedy work”.
The mechanism that Goldin describes is as simple as it is brutal. In the jobs that really count, those that pay the most, that give power, that allow you to move up, the ones who are available always and without reservations, those who answer emails at 11pm, win. Those who don’t need to go out early because the nursery is closing, those who can dedicate evenings and weekends without having to ask anyone to cover for them at home.
These jobs pay disproportionately compared to the actual hours for those who are willing to put everything else on the back burner. Goldin calls them voracious because they eat up all the available time, and reward those who don’t need to use that time for anything else.
As long as a couple doesn’t have children, both partners can, at least in theory, be at that table. But when the first child arrives, one of them has to take care of the care. And almost universally, among heterosexual couples, that someone is the woman. From then on she takes flexible work, he takes voracious work. He climbs the career ladder. She builds the family. At home, of course, someone manages everything: organizes, looks after, holds together the pieces of a daily life that only works because someone thinks about it. Goldin shows that it is in that passage that the gap tends to persistently open. Basically, at that moment, gender equality is thrown under the bus. The Sanremo journalist described this scenario exactly, and called it proof that things are fine.
The study that completes the picture
If Goldin explains the economic mechanism and ISTAT photographs it in Italy, a study published on Social Forces – one of the most authoritative sociological magazines in the world – adds the concrete numbers of what happens every day inside homes. Bianchi, Sayer, Milkie and Robinson analyzed decades of data on time use, updated up to 2010, and the results are these: married women do 1.7 times as much housework as their husbands, married mothers do 1.9 times as much as their fathers.
Before having children, couples divide responsibilities relatively evenly. Then comes parenthood, and that division solidifies into something much less symmetrical: care work becomes a female responsibility, paid work a male responsibility. The study explicitly warns that mothers who reduce their working hours to manage the family may appear to benefit in the short term, but in the long term they risk wage discrimination, skewed career trajectories and, in the event of divorce, very real economic vulnerability.
The wife who calls the shots at home, in other words, is paying a real and measurable price that he probably doesn’t see. Because it’s not his score to pay.
What happened in the Sanremo press room is something that many recognize, because it is a conversation that you often have with someone who looks at you with all the confidence of someone who has never had to deal with that 6 thousand euro difference, with those 273 hours worked less, with that 30.8% gap at the top where decisions are made. The Rag Dolls responded with the right phrase at the right time. ISTAT data, a couple of scientific studies and a Nobel winner (well, a woman) just put their signature on it.
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