Women in Transition Part 2
By SAM VAKNIN, UPI Senior Business Correspondent
SKOPJE, Macedonia (UPI) -- The worsening economic situation in the former Soviet bloc has placed a greater burden on women since 1990. Increasingly, there is an out-migration of men to larger towns, more prosperous regions or other countries for work. This heightens the domestic burden on women; the help they got from husbands, sons or other relatives is now largely removed. The economic slump has also forced women to increase food production from the family plots.
Feminism failed to take root in pragmatic central and east Europe. It was too ideological, often Marxist, too extreme, family-disparaging and man-hating. Petr Prihoda offered the male point of view in the Czech-English monthly New Presence: "I'm also wary of the revolutionary ambition of some feminist texts, with their ideas about changing present conditions, having seen enough attempted utopias for one lifetime".
Czech women tend to agree. "We myself ... and many others are not in search of global sisterhood at all, and it is only when we give up expecting it that we can get anywhere," says Jirina Siklova from the Gender Studies Center in Prague -- "It is each other's very 'otherness' that motivates us, and the things we find in common take on greater meaning within the context of otherness. There is so much to learn by comparing the ways in which we are different, and which the same elements of women's experience are global, and which aren't, and wondering why, and what it means."
Capitalism has improved the lot of women in some countries -- and considerably worsened it in others.
According to Elizabeth Brainerd of Harvard University, writing in the October 2000 issue of the Industrial and Labor Relations Review: "Under state socialism, women fared relatively well in the labor market: female-male wage differentials were similar to those in the West, and female labor force participation rates were among the highest in the world. Since the introduction of market reforms (there is) a consistent increase in female relative wages across Eastern Europe, and a substantial decline in female relative wages in Russia and Ukraine. Women in the latter countries have been penalized by the tremendous widening of the wage distribution in those countries. Increased wage inequality in Eastern Europe has also depressed female relative wages, but these losses have been more than offset by gains in rewards to observed skills and by an apparent decline in discrimination against women."
All in all, transition was not good to women. The privatization of state-owned enterprises was dominated by a male nomenclature of managers and insiders. Technological modernization was both male-driven and male-biased. Men in central and eastern Europe are still three times as likely as women to find a job. Between three- and four-fifths of all women's -- mostly menial -- jobs were lost, notably in the industrial sectors, especially in textile and clothing.
According to the February 2000 issue of the UNESCO Courier, 14 million of the 26 million jobs that vanished in eastern Europe since 1989 were women's. Unemployment among women is 5 percentage points higher than among men. Two years ago, the intergender gap in pay in Russia was 24 percent. It was over 15 percent in both Poland and Hungary.
In all the countries in transition, the highest rates of unemployment are among middle-aged and older women. Three quarters of the unemployed are women. The Ukrainians call it "unemployment with a female face." Women go unrecorded both when employed and when unemployed -- thus deprived of social benefits, health and unemployment insurance and labor-related legal rights.
When trained, women are relegated to clerical, low-skilled and low-paying jobs. Men are assigned to assimilate new and lucrative technologies. In some countries, women are asked by prospective employers to waive their rights, to produce a medical certificate confirming non-pregnancy, or, more rarely, to provide proof of sterilization prior to gaining employment.
Even in higher education, where women's participation has gradually increased, they are confined to "feminine" -- i.e., low pay and low status -- occupations. Vocational and technical schools are either defunct or do not welcome women. The rising cost of tertiary schooling threatens to dampen women's educational opportunities. Even in feminized professions (such as university teaching), women make less than 20 percent of the upper rungs (e.g., full professorships).
The very ethos of society has adversely changed. Resurgent nostalgic nationalism, neo traditionalism and religious revival seek to confine them to home and hearth. Negative demographic trends -- declining life expectancy and birth rate, numerous abortions, late marriage, a high divorce rate and an increasing suicide rate -- provoke a nagging sensation of "we are a dying nation" and the inevitable re-emphasis of the woman's reproductive functions. Hence the fierce debates about the morality of abortion in Catholic Poland, in Lithuania, Slovenia and even in the agnostic Czech Republic.
Many women believe that capitalism is for men, emphasizing, as it does, masculine traits, such as aggressiveness, assertiveness, and competition. Women political representation shriveled since 1989 when rubber stamp parliaments were transformed into loci of real power.
The few women that did make it are typically relegated to "soft" committees which deal with budget-poor social issues. There is a dearth of women among business executives of medium and large enterprises, or the owners of privatized enterprises. Job advertising is sex-specific and sexist to this very day.
Pay regulations and the tax system are skewed in favor of male employees. Child benefits were all but eliminated, maternal leave shortened, affordable day care facilities rendered extinct by massive cuts in social outlays. The quality of social benefits not yet axed has deteriorated, access to them has been restricted and supplies are often short.
The costs of public goods, mainly health and education, have been transferred from state to households either officially, once services have been commercialized, or surreptitiously and insidiously (e.g., patients required to purchase their own food, bed sheets and medication when hospitalized).
Swift deterioration in the quality of the region's health systems and the proscription, in certain countries, of the only effective form of contraception -- abortions -- led to an upsurge in maternal mortality and teenage pregnancy. The curtailing or absence of sex education yielded an epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases. Rape, spousal abuse, date rape, street prostitution, begging, especially by destitute widows -- are common phenomena. Divorce maintenance payments are often both pitiful and delinquent.
A generational abyss has opened between young women and their older sisters. The post-communist generations are conspicuous consumers, car owners, and career opportunists. They aspire to be managers, shareholders, politicians and professionals. The older ones, exhausted by decades of social turmoil and futile activism, prefer to stay at home, in relative tranquility, tinged with benign dependence.
Yet, neither fare well. East European pseudo-yuppies lack business skills, knowledge, contacts, supportive infrastructure, or access to credit. Older women cannot work long hours, lack skills and, when officially employed, are expensive, due to the burden of their social benefits. Consequently, women mostly migrate to services, light industry and agriculture -- the less lucrative sectors of the dilapidated economies of their homelands.
As far as women as concerned, the brave, new world of liberal democracy is old, patriarchal, discriminatory and iniquitous. This may yet prove to be transition's worst failure.