State Regulation of Women's Employment and Occupational Segregation in the Russian Labour Sphere – 100 Years of History Part 2. 1945-1991

Abstract

This paper, based on a general analysis of political documents and legislative acts, examines the changes in the regulation of employment conditions and regimes for women, as well as the dynamics of gender industry segregation. The first part of the article was dedicated to the initial Soviet period and the period of the Great Patriotic War (1917-1945). The second part covers the entire post-war Soviet period (1945-1991), during which there remained a commitment to the idea of maximizing women's participation in the economy. However, perceptions of the conditions for achieving gender equality in employment changed when the country faced the threat of critically low birth rates. As this demographic problem was directly linked to the high total workload of women, a system of benefits and preferences exclusively addressed to working women began to be developed, aiming to create "the most favourable conditions for combining professional and family duties." The implementation of an ever-expanding system of benefits did not lead to the equalization of opportunities for men and women in the labour sphere but contributed to the expansion of labour discrimination by gender and the formation of stereotypical views about jobs most "suitable for men" and "most suitable for women." The article analyzes the dynamics of differences in the sectoral employment structure of women and men based on historical and contemporary statistics, demonstrating that in the Russian Soviet society, committed to traditional gender role divisions, and without pressure on women in their choice of workplace, there was an increase in gender professional segregation due to the concentration of women in non-production sectors and men in material production sectors. The empirical basis for this study relies on data from the Central Statistical Office of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) and Rosstat. The statistical analysis of gender segregation dynamics in this study employed the Duncan index, which quantitatively assesses and compares differences between the distributions of women and men across sectors and types of economic activity.