Katarina Katz, Göteborg University

During the late Soviet period, female employment rates were high by international standards. The level of education of employed women was as high as that of men. Pregnant women and mothers of young children were protected by the labour legislation and women had the right 20 months of pregnancy and maternity leave. Employment in the USSR was, however, characterised by strong gender segregation in terms of occupation and industry. Most studies indicate a gender wage ratio of approximately 2:3. Using national statistics, Katz (2001) demonstrates that there was a strong negative correlation between the average wage in an industry and the percentage of female workers, when the level of education of workers is controlled for and that a survey made in the city Taganrog 1989 shows strong evidence of gender wage discrimination.

The present project compares gender inequality before and after the breakdown of the Soviet system. From a situation of labour shortage in the USSR, open unemployment gradually increased during the 1990s, to maximum of 15 percent reached in 1998 and then decreased to 6.7 percent in 2006. Thus, it did not reach the levels predicted at the beginning of transition, nor did disproportionately affect women, as had also been predicted (Fong, 1993, Mezentseva 1994, Bridger et al., 1996). Participation rates decreased for both women and men. During the period covered by the Labour Force Surveys of Statistics Russia - from 1992 onwards -participation declined about equally for men and women.

That the earliest predictions of a large scale exclusion of women from the labour market turned out to be ill founded does not, however, mean that the position of women on the Russian labour market was unchanged, neither in absolute terms, nor relative to men. Both women and men were affected by not only open unemployment but also substantial hidden unemployment in the form discouraged job seekers and of workers who were formally employed but on compulsory unpaid/partly paid leave or working but not receiving their wages. Both men and women suffered from the huge decrease in real wages. With dramatically increased wage dispersion, low-paid workers were the most severely hit by the fall in earnings and women predominated among the low-paid. There was therefore reason to expect an increased gender wage differential.

At the outset two issues, the intention was to focus on two issues that could be studied using survey data from Taganrog 1989 and 2000.
o How did the gender wage gap develop and how was it affected by changes in the impact of different wage determinants on earnings?
o How did the length of maternity leave change, when measured by at-work rates of women with young children in 1989 and 2000 and as reported retrospectively by women of different cohorts?

During the project other data on time-use in paid and unpaid work in Taganrog 1997/98 which was comparable to data in the 1989 data set became available. With the time-use data it was possible to study a broader aspect of the gender division of market and non-market work in pre- and post-transition Russia. Since the there was not enough time to take on all three topics within the framework of the project, the study of maternity leave gave place to one of the time-use of employed women and men. Some information was, however, integrated into the time-use based analysis of changes in the gender division of labour. The average length of maternity leaves was larger in the 1990s than in the 1980s, but while no women in the sample with children under one year worked in 1989, 15 percent did this in 2000. At-work rates of mothers with children aged 1-2 and 3-6 were, however, much lower in 2000 than in 1989.

In the wage analysis it was seen that if total labour income in 2000 is compared with state sector wages in 1989, gender inequality had increased quite sharply. The female to male ratio was down from 65% to 57%. For wages in primary job there was also a drop, smaller but still considerable, to 60%. The estimated wage equations showed that the earnings elasticity of working hours which had been very low in 1989 increased sharply. Thus, men's longer work weeks made a greater contribution to the differential in 2000. Returns to education were still higher for women but had increased more for men. Oaxaca-Blinder decompositions showed that men's more extensive self-employment contributed to the gender differential in 2000.

The most important result was that while in both years, only 10-22 percent of the gender wage gap could be attributed to human capital variables industry of occupation accounted for more than a third of it in 2000, 6-8 times as much as in 1989, depending on the measurement chosen. The main factor was a drastic fall in relative wages in education and health-care from an already low level in USSR when "material production" was always prioritised above services. The importance of segregation into "male" and "female" industries for the gender wage gap is noted in a recent Russian study (Oshchepkov, 2007).) That a considerable part of the gender wage gap in post-transition Russia can be explained by the low wages that the government pays to workers in two female-dominated industries is highly policy relevant.

The Soviet welfare regime strongly supported a dual earner family model, but one in which the man was perceived as the main earner and the woman as having the primary responsibility for childcare and domestic labour (Kiblitskaya, 2000, Ashwin, 2005). The research question was whether this asymmetry in gender roles within dual earner families increased or decreased after transition. Because of limitations of the data, the time-use analysis was restricted to a day on which respondents do some paid work. On average both women and men spend more time on paid work and less on unpaid work in 1997/98 than in 1989, but the changes are larger for men. Thus, the gender differential has increased in both respects. When the sample is divided into life-cycle categories, the increased gender specialisation is shown to be mainly in couples with children.

In Taganrog, mothers of young children were less likely to be at work in 2000 than in 1989. The most important result from this study is that even when both parents do work, there is increased specialisation. (Mother and father spent the same amount of time with children in 1989. In 1997/98 mothers spent twice as much as fathers.) This is important for women's career opportunities. If employers expect that young women will have children, make long career breaks and, when back to work have lower work commitment, this is likely to cause statistical discrimination against women, irrespective of their individual career commitment. Women who have been on maternity leave and afterwards worked fewer hours and spent a very large part of their energy on housework and childcare will be at a disadvantage relative to men of the same age during the remainder of their working lives.

The results from the two studies are connected. The gender division of labour in the household and gender inequality in the labour market interact. If men work longer hours and/or have higher earnings, this reinforces a division where women take a larger share of the unpaid work in the home. When women do more unpaid work, it has negative consequences for their labour outcomes, including their wages. A gender order which makes it more difficult for women to reconcile having children with paid employment is likely to be one of the causes of the drop in Russian birth rates the birth-coefficient by about a third, in the 1990s.

The results are about to be published in two Working Papers from the Department of Economics, University of Göteborg, "Transition to traditionalism? A study of time-use in paid and unpaid work during a workday in Soviet and post-Soviet Taganrog" and "Wages in transition. Gender differentials in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia". The former is under review by the journal Feminist Economics" after revision.

The studies have been presented at seminars in the Economics Departments of the universities of Göteborg, Karlstad, Växjö and Umeå and at the International Association for Feminist Economics conference 2004 and the SASE conference 2005. "Transition to traditionalism" is presented at the IXth International Academic Conference «Economic Modernization and Globalization, Moscow April 2008.

References:

Ashwin, Sarah (ed.) .2005. Adapting to Russia's New Labour Market: Gender and Employment Behaviour. London and New York: Routledge.
Bridger, Sue, Rebecca Kay and Kathryn Pinnick. 1996. No more heroines? Russia, women and the market. London: Routledge.
Mezentseva, E. 1994a. "What Does the Future Hold? (Some Thoughts on the Prospects for Women's Employment)" in Posadskaya, Anastasia (ed.) Women in Russia. A new era in Russian feminism, London: Verso
Fong, Monica S. 1994. "The Role of Women in Rebuilding the Russian Economy." Studies of economies in transformation, paper no 10. Washington D C: World Bank.
Katz, Katarina. 2001. Gender, Work and Wages in the Soviet Union. Houndmills, U.K. and New York: Palgrave.
Kiblitskaya, Marina. 2000. "'Once we were kings': male experience of loss of status at work in post-communist Russia" in Ashwin, Sarah (ed.) Gender, State and Society in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia, London: Routledge.
Oshchepkov, Andrei. 2007. "Gendernye razlichiia v oplate truda" in V. Gimpelson and R. Kapeliushnikov (eds.) Zarabotnaia plata v Rossii. Evolutiia i differentsiatsiia. Moscow. Izdatel'skii dom GU VShE. 2007.