Gender roles in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe

[15] The transition from socialism to neo-liberal market economies saw an over-representation of women in unemployment that had not existed before in the central and eastern European countries.

[18] Whilst there was a gender pay gap in places such as the Soviet Union, due to protective legislation that restricted women's employment in jobs that were considered dangerous or physically demanding which meant that due to the fact that in the centralised wage system, where market forces did not interfere, earnings within sectors were determined by the perception of a certain sector's productivity, laboriousness and social usefulness, women in Russia were highly concentrated in white-collar sectors such as education, healthcare, trade, food and light industry, their earnings were on average lower than those of men throughout the whole of the Soviet Union's history,[19] a similar concentration of women in the workforce and a similar trend were also seen in the German Democratic Republic.

[21] In this transitory period for many states there was economic disaster, and Gale Stokes comments on how "many of the customary practices of ordinary life, such as the value of time, gender relations, the nature of public discourse, and the job environment, changed.

"[22] Due to women being concentrated in the lower tier of the income distribution,[23] they were more vulnerable to such changes, and the rising social inequality[24] had an adverse effect on the gender pay differentials during the transition years.

[25] Rita Hansberry,[26] Christopher Gerry, Byung-Yeon Kim and Carmen Li[27] provide evidence that the increase in dispersion of incomes brought about by liberalisation had a negative impact on the gender wage gap in Russia.

[33] Éva Fodor and Anikó Balogh, contrary to other researchers,[4] based on pre-collapse and post-collapse survey data, have said that opinions on women as homemakers and their contribution to the workforce, have changed little in central and eastern European states, and in contrast western European states have greatly liberalised their views on women within the home and workforce.

[46] Following the collapse, the Pomaks of Bulgaria saw a resurgence in orthodox forms of Islam and Christianity, as many believed their "traditions were corrupted by communism", with similar sentiments seen in other groups.

Ghodsee comments on how for some men this included more strictly policing their wives' bodies than they had previously under the communist regime, and how also many women "seemed eager" to adopt such traditional gender roles.

[48] With the lack of autonomous feminist movements during the socialist period of Bulgaria, women's rights in the post-communist country has not had a great grassroots base, and is instead conducted mainly through professional NGOs.

For example, while in Poland abortion was restricted in the 1990s, in other countries the fall of communism actually led to the liberalisation of reproductive rights, such as in Albania,[57] especially during the later stages of the communist period, which saw aggressive natalist policies.