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This paper is inspired by the work of my brother Jeff, whose Ph.D. thesis is on the Russian Constitutional Crisis of 1993 and the emergence of the post-Cold War world order.
How much do you know about a country as routinely mentioned in American news as Russia? Pressing questions such as how the West should respond if Alexei Navalny - the strongest opposition to Putin’s domineering leadership in recent years - dies in prison, or how to handle the frequent Russian hacks into proprietary data of U.S. companies and government agencies populate our news outlets. For all of the coverage that focuses on Russia, Americans hear little about the on-the-ground political economy of what it is like to live and work in Russia. My interests lie more specifically in what it is like to live and work there as a woman. In comparative research of a handful of countries, I have been amazed to learn that despite a far less stable political economy, Russia’s female labor force participation rate has consistently outstripped major Western powers for the past 30 years, possibly more. Some historical and economic forces partly explain why.
Labor force participation data gathered by the World Bank from 1990 to 2019 shows Russia with an initially high female participation rate at 48%, far higher than the 43.7% participation average of the four large and homogenous western countries shown in the graph: Canada, France, the U.K., and the U.S. China, the only other communist nation represented in the data - a nation that faced a far different set of economic circumstances in 1990 - is also above the western average, but not by nearly as much as Russia. This indicates that Russia’s high female labor force participation rate is not due to labor decisions that were made under a different economic system altogether. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, female labor participation took a slight dip with the rest of Russia’s economy. Yet the transition to a market economy didn’t permanently dampen it. China had a comparable autocratic economic system to Russia in 1990 and has a vastly different path of convergence with the large market economies shown in the graph, since China’s female labor force participation rate steadily decreases over time in comparison to the Western average..
Russia then experiences sustained downward pressure in female labor participation that bottoms out at 47.3% in 1995. This tracks with the extreme economic upheaval and high inflation experienced in those years. This is because after the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia had an extremely difficult transition to a free market economy (Reddaway and Glinski). From 1991 to 1998 real GDP fell 43.3%, from 1991 to 1995 capital investment fell 78%, and in 1992 inflation was 1,354%, causing average real income to fall by 46% that year. All these figures really mean is production significantly declined and led to high unemployment in 1990s Russia. While the total labor force participation rate (inclusive of women and men) continued to nosedive until bottoming out in 1998, the female component began to pick back up in 1995.
Even though the West experiences consistent upward trends in female labor force participation, Russia’s worst year is still better than Western countries will experience until 2011. Russia also experienced a larger dip for women from 2006 - 2008, overlapping with the US’s subprime lending crisis and subsequent recession. Russia was not necessarily affected by it yet, because the IMF did not categorize the recession as global until 2009. This indicates that further exploration of factors influencing Russia’s internal job market in that period is merited. Overall, by 2019, although Russia has a bumpier and less constant growth trend, it still outpaces those countries with strong upward trajectories in female labor force participation.
Russia’s highly successful female labor participation is made all the more baffling by the fact that Russian women face far more blatant gender-based employment discrimination than women of other countries, due to what is known as “no women job lists.” Russian women were legally barred from holding 456 types of professions until 2019. They are only banned from 98 as of January of this year. These restrictions were introduced in 1974 for professions seen as high risk in terms of personal safety (jobs that, given the laws of supply and demand, are often better paid). Russia was not the only country to do this; many other former Soviet states enacted such measures. The original intent was justified as being protective of women’s safety and fertility. Although equality was a founding principle of Soviet society, the massive population loss from Russia’s three back-to-back wars put strain on the actual execution of equal opportunities. No-women job lists imply the value of women to the state was first and foremost reproduction, and then labor. The ban applies to all women, regardless of circumstance, so there were never exceptions for women that were for some reason unable to have children, but were still able to work. Beyond the obvious cultural impact of reducing the ability of women to make their own choices, the outright ban of these jobs eliminates 456 explanations of how women work at such high rates in Russia. The remaining list is being slowly chipped away at in courts, but at its basis is still a massive restriction to many well-paying jobs and a limit to skill diversity for women.
History gives some indication as to why Russian women have such a strong showing in the labor force today. High female labor force participation is a legacy of both Russia’s originally agrarian economy and deliberate policy intervention in the Soviet era. The majority of women in pre-Soviet Russia had social standing as subsistence farmers, or serfs. Women of the serf household provided critical assistance to male farmers in successfully executing planting and harvesting activities. When industrialization began in Russia in the late 19th century, women in urban areas were typically barred from doing the manual labor working in factories or mills required. This changed circa WWI, when women were recruited to help make up for wartime labor shortages. WWI also saw women being formally inducted into the military for the first time with the formation of units such as the 1st Российский женский батальон смерти, the “1st Women's battalion of death,” a shock unit that saw heavy fighting in the last days of Russia’s involvement in WWI. Women continued to be a critical component of both the agricultural and manufacturing economy throughout the Russian Civil War in the five years immediately following WWI. The new Soviet government sought to cement women’s participation as part of their push to abolish bourgeois principles. Women were given equal rights to men, and child rearing was intended to become a more communal responsibility. These reforms faced resistance from Russia’s traditionally patriarchal society, especially as Stalin shifted the nation to a full command economy. However, women remained a critical component of the labor force through the 1930s and WWII era. Once again, the war - known as the Great Patriotic War in Russia - required women to work on assembly lines, in the fields, but also participate on the battlefield as snipers, tank drivers and aviators. Post WWII, the view on women at work shifted partially due to the need to have women at home to raise children and the national priority to increase birth rates. Many job restrictions were justified by the need to increase birth rates - something Russia still struggles with. Women increasingly were expected to bear the double burden of motherhood and careers. Ultimately, high rates of female participation in the workforce would continue after the fall of the USSR, but women continue to face discrimination and disempowerment today. While Russia has one of the smallest gaps in gender participation, it has one of the highest gender wage gaps among high income countries.
Other questions still exist within this data, such as what could we learn from a nation of women being outright banned from hundreds of job types and still holding proportionally more than women of other large countries, all while being paid less? Women that have not only maintained consistent labor force activity spanning generations, but also spanning opposing labor market regimes? Without a built-in PhD friend, I would never have thought to explore Russia’s labor force and discover the wild contradictions it presents.
Edited by Jeff Hawn
Sources
Graph 1: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.TOTL.FE.ZS?contextual=default&end=2019&locations=RU-GB-US-FR-DE-CN&start=1990
Graph 2: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.ACTI.ZS?end=2019&locations=RU&start=1990
Graph 3: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.TOTL.FE.ZS?end=2019&locations=RU&start=1990
Graph 4: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-11/gender-gap-russian-women-want-more-than-to-drive-the-moscow-subway
https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-REB-4504
http://conference.iza.org/conference_files/worldb2014/posadas_j6007.pdf
http://webhome.auburn.edu/~mitrege/FLRU2520/Roudakova.pdf
“The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism against Democracy” by Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski
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