On April 18, 1948, the first general elections of republican Italy were held. Few women were elected in that first legislature: 4 female senators and 45 female deputies, 5 percent. It took almost 30 years (and seven more legislatures) for the threshold of 50 women in Parliament to be passed in 1976, and another 30 years to reach 150. Quota 300 was exceeded only in 2018, with 334 women elected (35 percent). The 2022 polls confirmed the trend: women now permanently make up one-third of parliamentarians.

In 2022, the institutional "glass ceiling" was also broken: after 65 governments headed by men, a woman, Giorgia Meloni, leader of the relative majority party, for the first time assumed the post of Prime Minister, resulting in one of the three governments with the largest female presence (22 women) in the history of the Republic. On the opposition benches, another woman, Elly Schlein, was elected secretary of the Democratic Party in February 2023.