Abstract

The essay aims to underline problems surrounding the social security protection of women workers who perform discontinuous working activities, both within and outside the employment subordination. Women's social security position reflects peculiar work and life's choices; women workers are particularly present in the context of particular work relations such as part-time and self-employment; women workers are in need to juggle work and family. These peculiarities are inevitably reflected in the levels of social security protection. The essay takes into consideration specific legal forms of regulation, thereby enhancing several contradictions which derive from the existing relationship between genders, discontinuous work, social protection. In the light of a public social security system more and more oriented towards the guarantee of minimum levels of social protection, the Author observes that women's discontinuous work can be regarded as a field for developing synergies between forms of local welfare, based on both vertical and horizontal subsidiarity and opened up to public and private competition.