Since Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s first feminine prime minister, introduced over social media final month that she was dumping her longtime boyfriend, Italians have hardly stopped speaking about it.

They’ve obsessed over the leaks of audio and video tapes revealing Andrea Giambruno, a tv information anchor who can be the daddy of the prime minister’s younger daughter, making lewd threesome and foursome jokes and obvious propositions to feminine colleagues.

Have been the leaks politically motivated, as Ms. Meloni has insinuated? Had Ms. Meloni’s Pricey Giambruno letter humanized her as an Italian Everywoman, or bolstered her robust, no-nonsense repute? Was the breakup dangerous or good for her political profession?

Far much less consideration has been paid to Mr. Giambruno’s conduct, which the general public discourse has taken with no consideration as a part of a tradition of sexism and harassment that’s commonplace for girls at work in Italy.

Mr. Giambruno’s employer, Mediaset, owned by the household of the late Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who made “bunga bunga” a boudoir title, gave him per week of paid “self-suspension” earlier than bringing him again on the present — for now, off digicam.

Within the land that #MeToo forgot, feminists and critics of Ms. Meloni had hoped that the prime minister would possibly use the event as an extended overdue teachable second, a uncommon alternative to reckon with the nation’s patriarchy and its legacy of Catholicism’s traditionalism, Berlusconi’s hedonism and the failure of successive governments to create social companies that would help extra girls to enter, keep in and excel within the work power.

As a substitute, on these factors, Ms. Meloni has been silent.

That has been a disappointment for some in a rustic the place girls say they’re nonetheless greeted with chauvinism by employers who see themselves as — and are sometimes handled as — all highly effective benefactors and patrons, concerning them as objects of amusement or flirtation.

Ladies in numerous professions in Italy say office harassment is the norm. A latest version of L’Espresso journal documented widespread harassment within the promoting trade. A latest survey discovered that 85 % of feminine journalists reported being subjected to some type of harassment throughout their careers.

Tatiana Biagioni, president of the Italian Affiliation of Labour Attorneys, who has labored for many years on office discrimination and harassment instances, referred to as the leaked recordings of Mr. Giambruno’s conduct a “unhappy probability to speak about what usually occurs within the office, as a result of this isn’t an remoted case, it’s a full-blown actuality.”

“That is an underwater river that makes the world of labor poisonous on this nation,” she mentioned.

Because it stands, the employment fee for girls in Italy — little greater than 50 % — is the bottom within the European Union or among the many Group of seven main economies. Ladies’s lack of participation is a drag on the financial system and contributes to a plunging birthrate. A Financial institution of Italy examine discovered that if simply 10 % extra girls labored in Italy, the nation’s G.D.P. may develop about one other 10 %.

“The query of ladies is the central, No. 1 knot that should be confronted,” mentioned Linda Laura Sabbadini, a director at Italy’s Nationwide Institute of Statistics. “At this time the emergency of Italy isn’t the birthrate, the birthrate is the consequence of the low employment of ladies and the low improvement of the insurance policies of social companies.”

Ladies are hardly seen on the prime of huge companies or main information organizations. Lower than 25 % of Italian professors are girls. Lower than 5 % of Italy’s streets or squares are named after a girl, and half of these are saints or martyrs or the Virgin Mary. Extra widespread are antiquated pictures of ladies, together with a horny tutorial on the general public broadcaster for girls on how to buy meals.

Ms. Meloni’s place as the primary girl to realize Italy’s highest place of energy — and her very public breakup from a person making crass come-ons within the office — makes her duty towards girls inescapable, some feminists argue.

“She’s turning into the primary feminist of Italy with out actually wanting it,” mentioned Riccarda Zezza, an creator and businesswoman who makes a speciality of points of ladies within the office.

Elly Schlein, the primary girl to guide the Democratic opposition, mentioned in a latest interview that it was incumbent upon Ms. Meloni to deal with such questions. “That there’s now the primary girl as prime minister of the nation doesn’t assist all different girls if she decides to not assist them,” she mentioned.

Ms. Meloni has herself acknowledged that duty.

In her first main speech to Parliament, she spoke about how breaking “the glass ceiling” prompted her to ponder “the duty I’ve towards all girls who face difficulties in asserting their expertise or, extra trivially, the precise to see their day by day sacrifices appreciated.” She has referred to as girls “an untapped useful resource” to be much less reliant on immigrant labor and has talked about coping with misogynistic feedback in Parliament. She mentioned in a latest interview that she as soon as ran for mayor of Rome whereas pregnant “as a result of they advised me I couldn’t.”

However she has additionally lengthy made clear she isn’t a politician in search of to change into a feminist icon.

The chief of the Brothers of Italy celebration, Ms. Meloni is steeped in a hard-right political tradition that has exalted girls as conventional moms and has opposed quotas to extend feminine illustration in enterprise and politics. She has rejected the female article “la” earlier than her title as president, insisting on the normal masculine “il.”

Ms. Meloni has for many years attributed her success in politics to her private onerous work moderately than the progress received by organized girls’s actions. “I’ve by no means believed, for instance, in girls’s politics,” she mentioned in a speech in March within the Chamber of Deputies Ladies’s Corridor.

So, it was lower than stunning that, when confronted with a problem that ladies’s politics has decried for many years, she referred to as it a private matter and went mum.

“There’s nothing in her assertion that claims ‘I stand in solidarity with the ladies who’re harassed at work, and I don’t condone that form of conduct,’” mentioned Giulia Biasi, an Italian author targeted on feminist points.

Silvia Grilli, the editor in chief of the ladies’s trend journal Grazia, which devoted a latest challenge to, and produced a quick movie about, the harassment of an Italian actress, mentioned the case of Mr. Giambruno served as a reminder of how widespread such conduct is, and that it had as a lot to do with energy as intercourse.

“I don’t assume there was even an intention to have an erotic relationship” with the girl Mr. Giambruno was talking to on the tape, she mentioned. “It was solely and completely to place her in her place.”

Precisely why Italy has lagged in girls’s development has been a subject of examine for historians, students and economists. Being the seat of the Catholic Church for two,000 years has performed not a small position, some say.

“Catholic tradition and philosophy is actually one of many parts that inhibits independence of ladies on this nation on the person and collective stage,” mentioned Renato Fontana, a sociology professor at Rome’s Sapienza College.

Within the Seventies, Italian feminists made some progress as they harnessed the development of ladies’s rights throughout the West. Divorce and abortion turned authorized. Pay turned considerably extra equal. In 1971 a legislation required the development of public nursery colleges, which research confirmed had been important for long-term educational success.

Nonetheless, by 1977, Italy had solely a 33 % fee of feminine employment, and the nation dipped underneath the substitute fee of births. Within the Eighties, when the nation’s debt ballooned, politicians selected to chop again on a social companies that might profit girls and make use of them.

As a substitute, Italy relied on these girls to take care of the younger and the previous in their very own houses, a coverage that match nicely with hard-right events, like those Ms. Meloni grew up in, which held deeply conventional views of the Italian household.

“We began with this concept that ladies belong to the household,” mentioned Ms. Zezza. “We actually by no means received out of it.”

Within the Eighties, the cultural power of Mr. Berlusconi swept throughout Italy. He boasted overtly about his sexual exploits. His media empire flooded the airwaves with scantily clad variations of his female perfect. Ladies inspired by the developments of the Seventies felt they suffered by way of misplaced a long time.

“It was as if Berlusconi turned all of that into some form of a joke,” mentioned Francesca Cavallo, a author on feminist points.

Laura Ferrato, a spokeswoman for Mediaset, mentioned it had completely investigated the matter and talked to “all of the folks concerned within the off-air remarks” and “anybody who has had contact with him within the workplace, within the TV studios and on the Mediaset premises. On the finish of the examination, and after he apologized, Mr. Giambruno resumed his work.”

Mr. Giambruno, who has made no public remarks, didn’t return a request for remark.

The present that exposed Mr. Giambruno’s dangerous conduct — a present well-known for 2 younger girls dancing on a newscaster’s desk — was additionally on the Berlusconi household’s community, she identified.

It was simply anther paradox that exposed “the grotesque points that make our nation onerous to grasp.”

Gaia Pianigiani and Elisabetta Povoledo contributed reporting.