Gender pay gap in Russia
It serves to some extent as an indicator of gender inequality level within a country, but even more so for the unequal opportunities faced by women and men in the labor market.
Also the indicator reflects the incompatible requirements of career and family as well as the poverty risk of single parent households, both problems which mostly women face.
These two main turning points in the Russian history frame the analysis of Russia's gender pay gap found in the economic literature.
Women also enjoyed various benefits, including fully paid maternity leaves, free childcare provided by enterprise or state owned kindergartens, as well as legal protection from overly physical and dangerous work.
[9] Some researchers[2][10] conclude that it was partly due to these type of laws that gender differences in earnings never ceased to exist in Russia and in the whole Soviet Union.
[12] Despite the lack of official statistics, McAuley (1981) managed to get data on wage differentials from a variety of sample surveys conducted in multiple regions of the country.
Furthermore, since both creativity and authority were identified with men, women who tried to pursue managerial or professional careers encountered subtle but effective resistance to their promotion".
[14] His text suggests that glass ceilings were present in the Soviet Union and deeply rooted in people's perceptions of women's role and gender norms.
Newell and Reilly (2000) similarly mention that, despite high labor force participation, women held few senior positions mostly due to two reasons: first, since Russia never went through the revolution in gender relations that took place in the West, the slow but fundamental shift in household division of labor did not happen; second and as a consequence, working women had to carry a double burden as the domestic duties remained entirely on their shoulders leaving them less time to pursue a career.
[9][3][5][6] The elimination of most controls on prices, wages, trade and currency exchange, enforcement of restrictions on enterprise subsidies, and exposure to international competition influenced in great measure the labor market institutions and regulations.
Therefore, the state priorities shifted from heavy industry to oil and gas production for international consumption, banking and finance, marketing and importation of consumer goods.
[5][15][16] Since women who are usually concentrated in the lower tier of the income distribution, are most vulnerable to this kind of changes, it is very plausible that rising inequality had an adverse effect on the gender pay differentials during the transition years.
[15] Hansberry[5] and Gerry, Kim and Li[16] provide evidence that the increase in dispersion of incomes brought about by liberalization had a negative impact on the gender wage gap in Russia.
[4][17] This, plus the budget cuts mentioned earlier, contributed in great measure to the reduction in the female labor force participation reported by the World Bank in Russia (from around 80–90% in the Soviet period to 59% in 1991, 58% – 1992, 56% – 1993, 54% – 1994, 53% – 1995, 52% – 1996).
And while some researchers found that the pay gap did not experience major changes, others show in their analyses that the wage differentials increased considerably during the transition years.
Most researches use data from the same source – the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS) to analyze trends and patterns in the gender pay gap in the post 1991 period.
[6] The typical neoclassical economic approach appeals to differences in human capital between women and men in estimating the factors that drive gender pay gaps around the world.
The neoclassical explanation usually relies on women's deliberate choices to acquire less education, invest less into their training and choose shorter working hours.
Kazakova (2007) for instance, found that in 1996–2002 the work experience difference between women and men in Russia was not significant and its influence on the wage gap was minuscule.
Under the influence of patriarchal traditions and gender stereotyping women often choose occupations that are considered by society to be appropriate for them and not necessarily the ones that offer better career perspectives and higher wages.
[2] Blau, Ferber and Winkler (2010) define labor market discrimination as the situation when "two equally qualified individuals are treated differently solely on the basis of gender (race, age, disability, etc)".
[22](Note that this definition is different from the one offered by feminist economists) Analysis of the pay gap in Russia shows that discrimination is one of the major factors that account for the magnitude of wage differentials between men and women.
EU, OECD, UN and other Western associations established consulting organizations and offered grants, which were supposed to help fulfill the restructuring of the Federal Employment Service.
However, these programs did not attract too much of public attention and the main professional retraining offered to women were in accounting, massage therapy, hairdressing, tailoring and childcare.
