ABSTRACT
In responding to the challenges thrown up by economic reform, our respondents faced a labour market deeply segregated by sex. This segregation takes place on various levels. In the first instance, the state proscribes the employment of women in particular kinds of work. The impact of this, however, is negligible in comparison to the self-sorting of employees into ‘gender-appropriate’ work, and the strong reinforcement of this through the preferences of employers for a particular gender division of labour. The gender of our respondents thus constitutes a constraint on their choices in the labour market, which is both internalised and externally enforced. This chapter examines the nature of the social conventions and beliefs which shape the pattern of gender segmentation of the Russian labour market. It also explores the degree to which discrimination affected the employment prospects of our respondents. Employers perceive every job to have a ‘gender profile’, but direct discrimination is less common than might be anticipated because employees generally sort themselves into gender-appropriate professions. At the same time, however, the Russian economy is in flux, which means that the gender profile of certain professions is changing. Men have the advantage in this process, because of the widespread assumption that they make superior employees. As was noted in previous chapters, women have managed to maintain their presence in the labour force in spite of the bias against them-they have not formed the majority of the unemployed during transition and female employment continues to be seen as normal. Nonetheless, men tend to be the employees of choice for the betterpaid and higher-status forms of work, and given the weakness of regulation during the transition era, there is little to prevent employers acting on such preferences. This chapter examines this process on the basis of an analysis of our coding and the trajectories of our respondents. In addition, we have used data from Valery Yakubovich’s survey of hires, which is introduced below.
