PARIS — When Alexandra Pascalidou, a Swedish-Greek writer and television host, joked on a Greek cooking show that dad rather than mom might make dinner for the children, her producer, she recalled, yelled into her earpiece to “cut that feminist nonsense.”

In Italy, a string of sex scandals involving Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi did not stop his camp from winning regional elections earlier this year, while further along the Mediterranean coast, the Spanish media routinely obsess more about the defense minister’s outfits than her policies.

Europe’s southern fringe, indebted and uncompetitive, has long been the euro zone’s weak link. But besides a sunny climate and shaky economic fundamentals, it also shares a long-entrenched machismo that is costing it dearly. As it turns out, the share of adult women in the paid workforce in the region lags men by almost 20 percentage points, compared with 12 points across the European Union, 9 in the United States and only 4 in Sweden.

Sexism, of course, is not the cause for Europe’s sovereign debt crisis, and in the short term, the euro’s prospects depend more on the right mixture of fiscal austerity and monetary stimulus than on sisterhood.