Evolution of Gender Role Attitudes and Gender Equality in Russia

Abstract

Social norms and individual attitudes are proven to shape individual behaviour and impact life-course decisions. The present chapter aims to systematize the fragmented evidence on the evolution of the gender role attitudes, and gender equality indicators since the end of the Soviet era to the present days in order to track whether the views of the Russian men and women have been developing towards more egalitarian, or more traditional, direction. The main focus is on such spheres as family formation and fertility, paid and unpaid work, and leadership and politics. The information on directly reported attitudes is withdrawn from a number of country-representative datasets and from polls collected by the Russian leading sociological and market research agencies. In the family formation and fertility sphere, the majority of the phenomena follow the tendencies characteristic to developed countries. The ambiguity and duality of the views can be observed when women’s economic participation, political empowerment, and even sharing of unpaid household duties are addressed.

1 Introduction

Social norms and individual attitudes are proven to shape individual behaviour and impact life-course decisions. As theories of late modernity see it, wider social patterns appear in the process of de-traditionalization and individualization (Huppatz and Dagistanli 2017); the latter is documented worldwide over the last decades (Brooks and Bolzendahl 2003). Reflected in opinion polls, gender roles in the labour market and at home have been transformed from traditional to more egalitarian, though there are voices suggesting the gender egalitarism trend reversed and flatten recently (Shu and Meagher 2017; Mackie et al. 2015). Simultaneously, there is the evidence of a relative stability of “people’s family preferences” with regard to marriage, motherhood and the desired number of children (Esping-Andersen and Billari 2015).

While in many countries gender equality levels are high in the individually-oriented spheres such as education and labour market, the equality is still low if one compares wives and mothers to husbands and fathers (McDonald 2006). Similarly, in the Soviet Union, even if gender equality in all spheres was officially declared and promoted, multiple asymmetries were still observed. Now, three decades after the start of the social and economic transition, a question arise if in the presence of declining fertility, can one also observe the erosion of family norms, and further, whether the views of the Russian men and women have been developing towards more egalitarian, or more traditional, patriarchal, direction.

The present chapter aims to systematize the fragmented evidence on the evolution of the gender role attitudes, and gender equality indicators in Russia since the end of the Soviet era to the present days. The information on directly reported attitudes, e.g., relative importance of family and work, is withdrawn from a number of representative datasets—such as World Values Survey (WVS)¹ and Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey of HSE (RLMS-HSE),² as well as from the polls collected by the Russian leading sociological and market research agencies such as the Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VCIOM) and the Fund ‘Public Opinion’ (FOM). Further, statistical information, e.g. on the average firth birth age, comes from the Russian Federal State Statistic Service (Rosstat)’s official statistics and datasets developed by international organizations.

First, the author introduces the definition of gender norms and discuss their measurement. Then this chapter concentrates on such spheres as family formation and fertility, paid and unpaid work, and leadership and politics, and with the mix of statistical and attitudinal information follow the trends in views and behaviours since the late Soviet times to the present days. Conclusions follow.

2 Norms: Definitions and Measurement

In the literature, the term “norms” may cover a range of non-interchangeable notions including values, attitudes, preferences, traditions, all deeply embedded into the social life and institutions (Pearse and Connell 2016, p. 34). However, all definitions of social norms include two important components - a reference group, a set of (collectively-defined) rules of conduct within the group; and in addition, the reciprocal expectation of the above-mentioned set of rules being followed. Individual behaviour then fits into one of the following patterns: imitation of behaviour of the group or behaving in a way one thinks the group would approve, or following the internal motivation connected to the self-worth perception (Cialdini and Trost 1998).

As Mackie et al. (2015) put it, “a social norm is what people in some group believe to be normal in the group, that is, believed to be a typical action, an appropriate action, or both.” (p. 8) The gender norms, in their turn, are “sets of social practices that relate to gender identity” (Huppatz and Dagistanli 2017, p. 1), and thus focus on distinction in the rules of conduct, and interaction between women and men. In the modern literature it is often seen as a set of customs and stereotypes to be changed in order to avoid discrimination (Pearse and Connell 2016). In interdisciplinary literature there is still a discussion at what degree women’s and men’s behaviour is shaped by biology (bio-psychological point of view) and/or socially constructed (Lévy-Garboua et al. 2006; Seiler 2007). In the economic research, the existence of norms is often only indirectly acknowledged, but has been becoming more and more prominent in underpinning the conclusions of economic analysis (e.g., Alesina et al. 2013).

Measurement of the social norms is a complex activity, which involves answering the following questions: Who is the reference group? What behaviour is typical in the group? What is approved of in the group? (Mackie et al. 2015).

A reference group can be defined as a group of the relevant others, such as colleagues (e.g., income comparisons in Clark and Senik 2010) or population of a region (e.g., social norms related to unemployment in Clark 2003). In this chapter, the opinions and views of the “average” women and men are used as proxies for social norms, thus, representing the population of the whole country or of a smaller geographical area.

Furthermore, in this chapter, the author focus first of all on the norms associated with gender (in)equality. In the academic literature and in policy reports, the economic participation, economic opportunity, educational attainment, health and well-being, and political empowerment are the dimensions most often involved into assessment of gender inequality (Jütting et al. 2008; Connell and Pearse 2015; World Economic Forum 2019). For example, the UNDP Life-Course Gender Gap index³ covers disadvantages in the labour market, job characteristics, as well as time spent in housekeeping activities. Similarly, McDonald (2006) speaks of the necessity to distinguish between gender equity in individual—education, labour market—and family-oriented institutions and spheres, especially when connecting equity to fertility decisions.

The Global Gender Gap index by the World Economic Forum is one of the synthetic indexes that also allows for tracking the development of gender equality in Russia since 2006 across four general dimensions (see World Economic Forum 2019, p. 48 for indicators definitions and sources); the subindexes access the equity in economic participation, educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment. By 2020, the total index for Russia reaches 0.706, placing the country on the 81^st position out of 153. Russia is ranked high in two spheres, namely educational attainment (index value is 1.000 of 1.000), and health and survival (0.980 of 1.000). The former subindex includes such indicators as the literacy rate, enrolment in primary, secondary, and tertiary education. The latter includes the sex ratio at birth, and the healthy life expectancy. The direct discussion of the education and health spheres will be further excluded from this chapter due to their good performance in terms of gender equity.

The two remaining subindexes lowering the value of the total index are the economic participation and opportunity (0.749) and, at the bigger extent, the political empowerment index (0.095). In case of the economic participation and opportunity, the indicators assessed are—in the order from the closest to the most distant from parity—percentage of professional and technical workers (1.000), the labour force participation rate (0.863), share of legislators, senior officials and managers (0.719), wage equality for similar work (0.712) and the estimated earned income (0.579). The estimates can suggest, regardless a high labour market participation, the existence of the glass ceiling and a still-wide gender wage gap (see also Chapter 10 and 13 of this book). The political empowerment—which is relatively low not only in Russia but also across the majority of countries of the world (see Chapter 15 for Kazakhstan)—covers the share of women in parliament (0.187), women in ministerial positions (0.148), and the yeas with female/male head of state within the last half-a-century (0.000). The recent development of the economic participation and opportunity and the political empowerment sub-indexes is clearly non-linear (Fig. 1.1), and due to its significant deviation from the parity, the two dimensions are of particular interest.

Fig. 1.1

(Notes data collected from the Global Gender Gap reports available at the World Economic Forum website. Retrieved from http://www3.weforum.org/)

Global Gender Gap index and its subcomponents, Russia

The gaps might signalize a range of constraints, including the social norms, preventing from the equality establishment. Thus, the evidence on the behaviour patterns and opinions widespread and accepted will be collected in the spheres of gender relationships where equality is not reached: family formation and fertility, paid and unpaid work, and leadership and politics. In particular, the author address the following:

• Family formation and fertility: legal status of marriage, age of the first marriage, acceptance of divorce, acceptance of the out-of-wedlock births, ideal number of children, age of the first birth and of the first marriage.

• Paid and unpaid work: priority on getting jobs when the latter are scarce, equality in contributing to the financial budget, sharing housekeeping and childcare responsibilities.

• Leadership and politics: opinion on the leadership qualities, most suitable gender in politics, most suitable ministerial portfolios for each gender.

3 Family Formation: Marriage and Divorce

In Russia, the legal status and perceived value of registered marriage changed several times over the XX century. Right after the bolshevik’s revolution—through desacralization of marriage and enhancement of gender equality—the “new Soviet people” would be breaded (Zdravomyslova and Temkina 2004). As early as in 1917–1918, illegitimate children got recognized at par with legitimate children, women got a possibility to keep their maiden names after the marriage, while divorce initiation became possible with no reasons indication. Later, the institute of registered marriage was re-valorized starting from the 1930s, and the abortion ban—alongside measures to protect mothers’ and children’s welfare—were introduced. Some liberalization of the views came only with the Khrushchev Thaw in the mid–1950s, and then from the mid–1960s in the new Family Code of 1968 that among other simplified the procedure of divorce (see Selezneva 2017 for the list of respective legal documents and further details for 1917–2017).

By the moment of dissolution of the Soviet Union, in 1990, marriage was still “early and universal” (Scherbov and van Vianen 2001, p. 286) and divorce acceptable by 80% of the population.⁴ According to the Whole-union Census of 1989, only 161 of 1000 persons aged 16 and older were never married. Yearly, more than 2.6 million marriages were concluded, and about 1 million of marriages dissolved, the divorce incidence being higher in the Baltic Republics and the lowest in Caucasus and Central Asia (Goskomstat 1990). In total, “between 1960 and 1992, the total divorce rate more than doubled, rising from 15–20 to 40–50%” (Avdeev and Monnier 2000, p. 17), the biggest share of the increase happening during the 1960–1970s. The crude divorce rate, namely a number of divorces per 1000 of population, rose from 1.5 in 1960 to 5.9 in 2002, and during the most recent decade decreased from 4.9 in 2009 to 4.2 in 2019. A decreasing absolute number of divorces is met with a restrained optimism of experts: the number of marriages is also decreasing, being substituted by cohabitation.⁵

The acceptability of divorce has been also growing⁶; it reached 89% of respondents by 2019. Interestingly, the leading acceptable reason for starting—and stopping—a divorce three decades after the dissolution of the USSR is financial, namely “poverty, unemployment and lack of opportunities to provide for the family (46% in 2019 vs 21% in 2013). The infidelity and jealousy (22% vs 24% in 2013) and selfishness and lack of mutual understanding (21 vs 19% in 2013) complete the top-3 pro-divorce reasons. The two most acceptable reasons for stopping the divorce procedure are problems with division of property and housing (19%), and national or religious customs (15%).

As for the mean age at the first marriage, it had barely changed over a century. For women from the end of the XIX century to the breakdown of the USSR, it amounted to 21.4 in 1897, and 21.8 in 1989, respectively (Scherbov and van Vianen 2001). The mean age at marriage, however, varied greatly across generations due to, for example, famine and war periods. From the 1960s to the mid-1990s, the average age at the first marriage was well under the levels of the western Europe and still declining for both genders, e.g., 26.5 and 23.9 for men and 24.7 and 21.8 for women in 1960 and 1992, respectively (Avdeev and Monnier 2000). Rosstat⁷ reports on the average marriage age of women plummeting under 18 by 1994, and a practically linear growth since then to reach 25.3 by 2015–2017. Before 1994, the first marriage took place most frequently at the age of 18–22 (18–19 for 44.5% of women, 20–22 for 43.8% of men); by 2015–2017, both genders choose the age of 23–25 (28.9%) for the first marriage, men still having a tendency to marry on average later than women. This evidence aligns with the opinion⁸ on the ideal age of the first marriage, as 24 for women (in 2019, or 23 y.o. in 2017) and a bit higher, 27 y.o., for men.

Vishnevsky (2006) points out, that during Soviet Censuses the self-defined marital status was registered, which often led to anecdotal situations with the number of married women exceeding the number of married men (p. 100). The first attempt to estimate the share of unregistered marriages (grazhdansky brak) was undertaken in 1967, leading to an estimate of 9–13% unregistered pairs. Registered and unregistered partnerships are accounted as two separate categories only since Micro Census of 1994, giving an estimate of 6.5% of men and 6.7% of women living in unregistered marriage. Two decades later, the cohabitation shares among all partnerships are manifold higher and continue to grow⁹: from 20.8% of women and 24.3% of men in 2010–2014 to 40.6% of men and 41.3% of women in 2015–2017, respectively. In December 2014, 16% of respondents¹⁰ declared cohabitation unacceptable; interestingly, this is only a 2 p.p. decline in comparison to a poll conducted in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in 1989. A higher incidence of cohabitation barely impacted the social views.

While the share of cohabiting couples has been growing, the importance of the official registration is still high¹¹ (77% in 2019), with even higher support by older generations. Further, women value the official act of registration more than men, and moreover even consider it as an obligatory action for the first marriage¹² (65.6% of women and 58.6% of men). For the consecutive marriages, the obligatory character of the registration shifts to the second place, giving space to desirability of the registration.¹³ Among men, the view of the non-obligatory—and non-desirable—registration of marriage is more widespread in comparison to women, and in particular among younger men (14.2%, under 25 y.o) when compared to older men (8.4% among 40 and older).

Pregnancy—and birth of a child—continues being a strong motive for marriage registration. The stigma of an out-of-wedlock child was re-introduced in 1944, with the notion of “single mother” and a dash instead of the name of biological father in birth certificate; the latter remained in the legislation until 1968 (Denisenko and Elisarova 2014). The share of children born in cohabitation has been growing, and accounted for 7% in 1980–1983 and already 29% in 2000–2003 (Perelli-Harris and Gerber 2011). What also changed over these twenty years is the age composition of the mothers: in the 1980s out-of-wedlock births were concentrated out of the peak reproductive age (20–35), while in 2001 the births are more uniformly distributed across different age groups.¹⁴ Moreover, the births out of registered marriage are more characteristics for less educated women in unstable cohabitation, the so-called “pattern of disadvantage”, associated with high probability of further rearing the child by the unmarried mother alone (Perelli-Harris and Gerber 2011). Over the same period the share of pregnancies that led to marriages—in order to lower the social pressure—declined from 46 to 37% (ibid.).

This tendency fits the milder views on legitimization of children born out of official marriage: even if the most important reason for creation of a family is procreation¹⁵ (the statement supported by 60% of respondents in 2014 and by 56% in 1989), 28.9% of women and 33.1% of men think¹⁶ an official registration of the marriage is not needed if a child is already born. Only about a third of the respondents (35.8% of women and 38% of men) believe the registration is then obligatory.

4 Fertility: Ideal and Actual Number of Children

According to the last Soviet Census of 1989, right before the start of social and economic transition, the average family size was at 3.5; in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic¹⁷ the average was only slightly lower at 3.2. The urban (3.3) and rural (3.8) family size averages suggested the prevalence of one-child families in the urban, and two-children families in rural areas (Goskomstat 1990).

The USSR average barely changed in comparison to the Census of 1979 (ibid.). In fact, already in the 1970s, the share of first-borns among all children in the USSR reached 60%, surpassing many western countries.¹⁸ This tendency is one of the signs of family model transformation, rooted in the early XXth century, and accelerated in the 1970s.

In the literature that address the 1970s, authors mention transformation involving multiple life dimensions and at the end impacting the family model widespread (Vishnevsky 2006; Hilevych and Rusterholz 2018): changing live standards, further development of the Social Security system and thus lower dependence of elderly on their children, improved medical provisions and decreased infant mortality. Simultaneously, the tempo of civil construction (i.e., khrushchevka) increased and lead to a possibility of families to leave communal flats and move to own housing. Villages were ageing because the youth moved to urban areas. The view of children as a workforce got abandoned (Litvinova 1989) and got substituted by the idea of having children as one of the options—for self-realization—among many (McDonald 2006). The patriarchal family model¹⁹ with numerous children was mostly being abandoned in favour of the urban family model—parents and their children—which means that multiple generation stopped living together and sharing financial and family responsibilities.

At the beginning of the 1970s, average number of children per family in industrial cities was equal to 1.4 (Novikova et al. 1978). By the end of the 1980s, 34.2% of population lived in two-member households, 28.0% in three-member families, 25.2% in four-member families, and only 12.6% in the big families (4–5 family members) (Vyshnevsky 1996).

By the beginning of the 1990s, the urban nuclear family is the most widespread family type. However, due to the economic difficulties of the transition period, multiple compound/composed families (slozhnaya semya) are formed. Grown-up youth, especially those without higher education and with difficulties to find a stable employment, could not buy or rent an appropriate housing and thus establish their own households. The compound families, that resembled patriarchal families, as several generation live together got widespread due to the scarce financial resources (Kultygin 1993).

Over the 1990s, further convergence of birth rates for rural and urban population was observed,²⁰ with 1.2 children born per woman in urban areas. The variation of the number of children born per woman reduces (Maleva and Sinjavskaja 2006). Data from the World Value Survey²¹ allow to illustrate how the number of children per woman (family) and the desired number of children were declining over the first two decades of the transition (Table 1.1).

Table 1.1 Actual and ideal number of children per woman

As it is across Europe, the ideal (or desired) number of children on average exceeds the number of children actually born (Table 1.1, also see Ajzen and Klobas 2013). This evidence confirms the well-known conclusion that “fertility ideals” cannot predict actual fertility (Sobotka and Beaujouan 2014). The ideal number of children (or “ideal family size” in some versions) is likely to deviate from the actual number of children born as the former embodies the evaluation that is relevant to the “ideal conditions”. The discrepancy between the ideal and actual conditions leaves space for policy-relevant studies of constraints leading to the deviation from the ideal situation (Morgan and Racking 2010).

Nevertheless, the “ideal number” can be seen as reflecting the social norm widespread in a society,²² namely “the air du temps […] the changing attitudes toward family, childbearing, and the value of children in society” (Sobotka and Beaujouan 2014, p. 393; Philipov and Bernardi 2011). In fact, the ideal number of children varies across the world (see Mussino and Ortensi 2018, and the OECD Family Database²³). In (Western) Europe, two children as the ideal number stayed rather stable over the last century (evidence collected by Esping-Andersen and Billari 2015), though the underlying social norms can erode in the near future leading to the one-child idea dominating in Europe (Sobotka and Beaujouan 2014).

The Eastern European ideas, namely the “less than two” children (Mussino and Ortensi 2018) align with the evidence for Russia: “not less that one child, but no more that two” (Avdeeva 2010, p. 67). In addition, Zakharov (2008) argues that among Russians, the desire to be like the relevant others is followed in a rather strict manner—, even among emigrants (Mussino and Ortensi 2018)—which leads to the smaller variation of the number of children born per woman from the social norm.

At the beginning of the 1990s as in the 1970s, the ideal number of children oscillates near 2.7–2.9 (Novikova et al. 1978; Bodrova 1994). In can also be seen from the WVS data for 1990 in Russia if observing the women that completed their fertility by the year of the survey (over 50). It is worth noting, that from the 1990s through the 2000s, the ideal and the actual number of children drops to 2 and below (Table 1.1).

A decade later, in 2007, the youth aged 16–26 was explicitly asked to imagine an ideal situation; 2.3 children came as the average ideal number.²⁴ The desired number of children in the contemporary conditions is 0.5 lower (at 1.8). From the same survey, one can note that the ideal number of children is aligned with the actual number of children in the families of parents (2.3 against 2.1). This evidence reminds findings of Testa and Grilli (2006), and it also can be clearly seen in the WVS data (Table 1.1). The latter implies that the desired—and thus the actual—number of children per family unlikely exceeds two in the nearest future.

The results of public polls by VCIOM are more optimistic²⁵: while in 2014 two children was the most preferred option (53%), and three children followed with 28% of respondents, in 2018, it is already 42 and 43% of respondents, respectively.

When interpreting these whole-Russia figures, one should however be cautious. Nowadays, in the aftermath of implementation of the maternal capital scheme in 2007, fertility declines for the first and second births and increases for the third and further births, especially in the North-Caucasus region (see Kazenin and Raksha 2019 and Chapter 2). Similarly, Iwasaki and Kumo (2020) underline the regional and intergenerational heterogeneity in fertility, and list a lower share of Slavic population as one of the factors boosting regional fertility.

5 Paid and Unpaid Work

In the context of paid and unpaid work division in a couple, by the traditional gender roles the author understands that “women [align] with nurturing and the home, including employment that relates to care, and men with breadwinning, the public sphere, strength, and rationality” (Huppatz and Dagistanli 2017, p. 1). Thus the traditional roles prescribe that women are responsible for all housekeeping duties, including childcare, while only their minor involvement in the labour market is accepted.

At the foundations of the Soviet state, alongside the proclamation of the equal rights of women and men, protection of motherhood and childhood was guaranteed with with such measures as child care leaves for mothers and an extended network of child care facilities in order to achieve the ability to combine work, housekeeping, and motherhood (see Zavadskaya 2001 for the Soviet legislation review). However, the desire to free women from “kitchen slavery” got over the years transformed into the expectation that women would simultaneously perform the roles of workers and mothers-housekeepers. The dual-earner/state-female carer scheme²⁶—with the childcare provided in some occasion by state through childcare facilities—was explicitly promoted in the Soviet Union (Motiejunaite and Kravchenko 2008).

Two tendencies can be noted. First, the institutional and social expectations and norms reaffirmed the housekeeping and child rearing as women’s responsibility (e.g., childcare leave unavailable to fathers until 2007). Moreover, as these tasks were associated with a lower prestige in the eyes of the society, women considered work as a way to increase their own prestige in the eyes of the others, in particular, of their husbands and children (Novikova et al. 1978). Already the generation born in the 1950s judged housekeeping activities rather negatively due to their monotonicity and low productivity. In the 1970s, sociological surveys showed the active interest of women towards being involved into professional and political activities, to socialize with other workers and for being economically independent.

The second tendency was that, men were favoured in the labour market but “squeezed out” of the participation in family life, with their main function within family often limited to earning money (Ashwin and Lytkina 2004). This led to a lower authority of men within families, and desire of men to further improve their labour market position. Instead of an effort towards increasing intra-family cooperation in performing the housekeeping activities—as requested by women—polls from the end of the 1980s reveal a demand for further development of the public service sector—as requested by men (Novikova et al. 1978; Litvinova 1989).

After the transition start, labour market participation became one of the individual choices, unlike in the Soviet times, when its absence was considered illegal and stigmatized (tuneyadstvo or parasitism). Multiple studies mention that the decline in the employment rate of women was much lower than it would be expected. Over 1992-1998, women contributed up to 40% of family budgets (see Åhlander 2001 for a review). The return to the male-breadwinner model—if it was desired—would not be sustainable due to insufficiency of one income (male’s one) to maintain the whole family.

The following observations should be taken into considerations here. Women experienced a lower social pressure when losing their employment (Hadfield 1999). Moreover, the new working reality harmed more the conditions of female workers in comparison to their male counterparts: multiple social welfare policies and measures aiming at improving work-life balance of (working) mothers disappeared or declined in volumes (Glass 2008). Working women were not seen as principal breadwinners, and thus—in the eyes of society—could not pretend to get jobs while men were unemployed.

It is noted in the literature that women themselves accepted this “lower status” in the labour market (Ogloblin and Brock 2005). Similarly, 33.7% of female and 43.6% of male respondents, agreed in 1990 that in case of scarcity of jobs, men should have more right for getting jobs than women.²⁷ The unemployment rate was growing, over the 1990s—Rosstat²⁸ reports 5.2% unemployment rate in 1992 and already 13.3% in 1998—and so the agreement of both genders to preferential treatment of men in the situation of job scarcity. From 1999 to 2011 the unemployment trend was negative (12.6 to 6.6%), and similarly, the percentage of those agreeing with the statement above was declining. An interesting observation, however, can be done: over the two decades in consideration the share of those who choose the category “neither men or women” has been also growing (Fig. 1.2).

Fig. 1.2

(Notes The author’s estimates based on WVS for Russia)

Support of the opinion that men should be given preference in case of job scarcity

A preference for a specific gender of workers—a discriminatory practice - can still be found in HR practices, though its incidence is declining (Roshchin and Zubarevich 2005; Gerasimova 2010). In 2007, 36% of job vacancies published in specialized newspapers in Moscow explicitly mentioned the preferred sex of the applicants. In three cities covered by the study (Moscow, Samara, and Kemerovo), 44% of vacancies also included a discriminatory age limit (41 on average) for the applicants; among those, 56% of adds stated explicitly the preference for male candidates (Gerasimova 2010).

The alleviation of recruiting discrimination is suggested by the self-assessed difficulty of finding a job in a hypothetical situation of lay-off (Fig. 1.3). While men are still slightly more confident to find a new job of equivalent quality in comparison to women, the difference declined significantly over the three decades of transition.

Fig. 1.3

(Notes Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey, 1994–2018, the authors’ estimates)

Self-assessed confidence of finding a new job in situation of lay-off

In 1994, 19.1% of women were absolutely or fairly certain’ to find a new job, against 34.5% of men. By 2018, the gap between responses of two genders shrank to roughly 2 p.p. (certainty among 35.4% of women and 37.2% of men).

If women and men evaluate their chances to find a good job similarly, what would this mean for the equality of financial responsibilities? A decade after the transition start, the purely traditional view²⁹ of men as breadwinners and women as housekeepers was supported by 12.7% of men and 22.4% of women only.

The opinions collected, in fact, align with the inherited from the Soviet era model of `dual-earner/female-carer’. In 2000, 38.8% of men and 34.2% of women agreed that it is bad for family life if wife works.³⁰ Simultaneously 40.1% of men and 52.8% of women agreed³¹ that a working wife is more respected in her family in comparison to being a housewife. The opinion that being housewife is as fulfilling as working, declined over the first 15 years from the transition start, but reversed in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008 (Fig. 1.4). The interpretation of the latter can be manifold: a reflection of a more positive view of housewives in general due to recognition of their unpaid work, a higher attractiveness of the housewife’s role in times of higher uncertainty, and a self-validation of the women’s role in case when the scare jobs should be taken by men. Furthermore, for some working women, the own income might still be important as an insurance to be able to provide for the children financially in case of the divorce (Hilevych and Rusterholz 2018).

Fig. 1.4

(Notes WVS, Russia, 1990, 1995, 2006, 2011, the authors’ estimates)

Opinion that being a housewife is just as fulfilling as working

What caused mixed feelings is a possibility of women having more income than husbands: 47.3% of men and 37.8% of women would see is negatively.³² Nevertheless, the support³³ of the equal financial responsibility for the family is highly widespread through the 1990s and at the beginning of the 2000s, particularly among women. By the end of the 2010s, the equality idea start ceasing. In 2019, the agreement shares are practically halved: 28% of men and 43% of women consider the equal distribution of financial duties a fair practice³⁴; over a half of the respondents believes that men should bear a higher financial duty (66% of men, 52% of women). In Moscow and St. Petersburg, the views are slightly more egalitarian (52% for equality and 41% for responsibility shifted on men). In urban style settlement and rural areas, two thirds (62%) of respondents assign the role of the main breadwinner to men.

If one is observing a shift towards the more traditional roles in the financial responsibility sphere; how then the division of responsibilities for unpaid work has been changing?

In 1990, adult female family members spent nearly trice more time on unpaid housekeeping activities than adult male family members, namely 6:39 hours daily for women and 2:51 for men in urban areas, and 7:16 and 3:04, respectively, in rural areas (Rosstat 2018, p. 182). After nearly 15 years, in 2014, the time gap declined significantly, but mainly due to the reduction of the housekeeping and care time pursued at a greater extend by women in comparison to men. In 2014, the housekeeping budgets shrank to 4:28 daily for women and 2:38 for men in urban areas, and 4:59 and 2:41, respectively, in rural areas. The UNDP reports³⁵ very similar figures for women (4:25) and an even lower amount of housekeeping time by men (1:57). Let’s take the urban area averages from Rosstat: from 1990 to 2014, the share of unpaid work performed by men increased from 30% to 37%; as mentioned above, this increase is not obligatorily the good news for gender equality.

By 2019, the idea of equal distribution of household chores appeals³⁶ to 77% of women and 64% of men; the majority of remaining respondents sees housekeeping as women’s domain. Moscow and St. Petersburg are the most pro-equal in the views (80% of support).

Recalling the Soviet times idea of father’s function reduced to financial provision, the author also considers the opinions related to child rearing and care. On the one hand, by 2014 the agreement³⁷ on the importance of both parents participating in education and upbringing of children is rather universal (86% of men and 89% of women). In 2019, the support³⁸ for equality in child rearing duties declined, accounting for 78% of men and 85% of women. The most important, the Russian respondents believed³⁹ that fathers are as capable as mothers in taking care of children (70% in 2017, 72% in 2019). The youth (18–24) was even more confident (90%).

Nevertheless, the share of fathers taking a parental leave for caring of a child under 1.5 y.o. is still extremely low⁴⁰ (2.01% in 2018). Unsurprisingly, in 2019, only 10% of respondents said⁴¹ they knew a family with the father on parental leave. The knowledge that father is also eligible for the parental leave—since 2007—is relatively low, namely 45% of women and 55% of men; 28% of men and 32% of women heard of this measure only at the moment of the poll. Furthermore, 55% of male respondents and 63% of female respondents declared⁴² that could not imagine that in their family the father would take a parental leave to care for a newborn while the mother restarts working; such situation is not judged as normal.

Financial provision for the family continue entering the top-2 of father’s responsibilities. In 2014, 22% of men even mentioned⁴³ a high pressure making them to work more (42% in 1989) as one of the negative sides of family life. In 2019, the view of husband as breadwinner is supported⁴⁴ by 48% of respondents, while 47% value the role of educator of the own children more. Involvement of a father into child caring and the ability to provide for the family are the most often mentioned⁴⁵ components of the parenthood. A bad father is the one who is “indifferent” (37%). A good father is the one “who is involved in child rearing”, and “raises a good person” (21%). The financial aspect is found on the solid second place: a bad father “does not provide for his family”; a good father, on the opposite, “makes good money”, “works” (20%).

Another poll⁴⁶ in June 2020 re-confirms these two roles in the context of the image of a “responsible father”, namely the ability to provide for family (36%), to spend time with children, organizing games, and teaching them useful skills (35%), to teach children finding solutions in difficult situations (28%).

The respondents feel that the modern fathers have a better connection to sons in comparison to the past. However, a number of yet hypothetical steps could make—not only financial—involvement of fathers in the life of families even stronger. First of all, a more responsible view of parenthood is needed in the mass-media⁴⁷ (62% respondents in 2019). Further, additional measures of social policy were seen⁴⁸ as potentially beneficial, including one week of paid leave for fathers within the first month after birth (79% in 2020), one month of a paid leave for father to be taken within three first years after birth (89%), and introduction of “paternal capital” (an analogue to the maternal capital, starting from the third child born within the same marriage) (83%).

6 Leadership and Politics

The core institutional factors of gender equality go beyond the economical and educational participation and opportunities, and also include political empowerment for both genders (Jütting et al. 2008). Russian women were actively introduced to social, economic, and political life of the country since the Revolution of 1917. By 1929, the Communist Party announced that women won their struggle for equality (Nechemias 2016).

Nowadays, the potential of women in leading and managerial roles is not neglected: at the beginning of the 2000s, only 16.6% of men and 35.5% of women agreed that men are more suitable for those roles.⁴⁹ A leader is someone who can inspire and lead people, and can also build a team (options mentioned by 52% of men and 70% of women, and 50% of men and 57% of women, respectively).⁵⁰ Thus, gender is not important for success in the professional leadership (58% of respondents). The high incidence of men as leaders can be explained by men more likely having a penchant for leadership, e.g., “[men] have a strong character”, “they are career-oriented/leadership qualities”, but also by stereotypes characteristics for a traditional gender model, e.g., “[because] it is common/patriarchal society”, “[men] are free/fewer household chores”, “[men] are the head in the family/breadwinner”, and even “because they are men!”.⁵¹ The two main perceived reasons preventing women from becoming leaders are lack of interest (36%) and lack of leadership qualities (35%), then follow the extensive family duties (31%), barriers made by employer (26%), and stereotypes (15%).

In general, women are more supportive towards other women becoming leaders⁵² (58% vs 36% of men). Rural respondents see women-leaders in a more positive manner (55% positively, 42% negatively), while in the urban areas the opinions are reversed (e.g., 44% support and 53% do not support women as leaders in Moscow and St. Petersburg). About a quarter of the respondents, however, believes that female leaders are more suitable in the traditionally female-dominated industries such as education, healthcare, fashion and culture (also see Chapter 12). This aligns, for example, with the recruiting study—undertaken nearly 15 years before the poll cited above—by Roshchin and Zubarevich (2005) who reveal that employers followed gender stereotypes when looking for employees, e.g., a secretary should be a woman, while for a position of engineer a man would be preferred.

Moving from the topic of professional leadership to politics, the author finds even more traditional views on the role of the two genders. Already after the WWII, women’s presence was the most widespread—one-third of all positions in 1966—at the lowest levels of the party hierarchy. Women often held part-time positions, and positions of secretaries of the primary party organizations and party cells. At higher levels, the female share among regional and country secretaries stuck to one-digit figures. A relatively high representation of women in the USSR Supreme Soviet was mainly due to a system of gender quota. As Nechemias (2016) notes, the share of women among the party elite, the Central Committee, reached 4% only by 1986, and only one woman (Ekaterina Furtseva⁵³) served in the Politburo between the WWII and the start of the perestroika; two more women during the perestroika. The transformation of the USSR Supreme Soviet into the Congress of People Deputies at the edge of the 1990s, led to a decrease of women’s share among the deputies.

During the transition period, the issue of gender equity in politics was overlooked, as liberal and market economy was assumed to guarantee the equality “by default” (Metcalfe and Afanassieva 2005). Russian women “found that they would be discriminated against in legislation and would lose power relative to men in the political sphere” (Åhlander 2001, p. 57). The persistent low level of representation of women in the legislative system led to the criticism from political activists stating that democratization without women is not democracy (Nechemias 2016).

In the first Parliament elections in 1993, that followed the Constitution reform by Boris Eltsin, the Women of Russia (Zhenshchiny Rossii)—a woman only electoral bloc—took 23 of 450 mandates in the State Duma, the lower house of the Russian Parliament.⁵⁴ The party image irradiated a search for consensus, not for power, which often mentioned as the reason of their success in 1993 (Nechemias 2016). Already in the 1995 elections, the electoral block did not pass the 5% barrier in the party-list ballot.

By 2000, the proportion of women in the Parliament⁵⁵ was as low as 7.7%, though the proportion of seats grew since and until 2007, and then again since 2016. In 2018, 15.9% of seats in the Duma (71 of 447) and 17.8% (or 30 of 169) in the House of Federations were occupied by women (Rosstat 2018). According to the Political Empowerment subindex, in 2020, Russia is placed on the 122th position of 152, between Sierra Leone and Morocco (World Economic Forum 2019).

One of the reasons for the relatively low success of women in the political sphere might be the ideas widespread among women themselves. In the early 2000, only 22.3% of men and only 12.5% of women agreed that men and women should play equally important parts in politics.⁵⁶ In general, Russians still believe that men make better political leaders than women. That can be clearly seen in the data from the World Value Study and the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring survey for 1995–2011. Interestingly, men support this thesis more widely in comparison to women, namely 65.2% of men and 51.2%.⁵⁷ As in case of the professional leadership, in 2011, Russians⁵⁸ could imagine female politicians to succeed in top governmental positions, however would find them more fitting for portfolios of the ministers associated with such traditional female occupations and spheres as culture (61% men, 66% women), healthcare (59 and 65%), and education and science (56, 60%). Over 30% of respondents could see a woman as a successful minister in economy sphere (minister of finance, minister of agriculture, minister of economic development), but only 12 to 25% could imagine a female minister in the legal, justice, defence and military sphere (e.g., for Chief of Justice of the Supreme Court, Chairman of the Federation Council, Prime Minister, or Minister of Defence). The poll from 2014, apart from being in accordance with the most suitable for women ministerial portfolio, reveals that 44%—or 11 p.p. less in comparison to 2004—could imagine a woman becoming president of the Russian Federation within the upcoming 10-20 years.⁵⁹

In the latest polls,⁶⁰ one also sees the ambivalence of the opinions. In 2019, 81% of respondents agrees that women should participate in politics equally with men. Simultaneously, 40%—or 13 p.p. more in comparison to 1998—think that “the number of female politicians in Russia is sufficient”. The assessment of women politicians reveal a number of gender stereotypes coming to the fore both connected to disadvantages (soft character—9%, being emotional—9%, being busy not only with job but also children and family—6%) and advantages (better understanding social problems—11%, another way of thinking and intuition—8%). Professionalism and wisdom is only mentioned by 7% of respondents.

7 Conclusions

In the demographic literature it was already announced nearly two decades ago that Russia would be unlikely returning to the traditional patterns of marriage (Zakharov 2012). Majority of the phenomena, such as older age of the first marriage and of the first birth, more frequent divorces and widespread—and socially accepted—cohabitation are all the tendencies also characteristic to developed countries.

However, this statement would not be true in all spheres the gender roles are penetrating. The ambiguity and duality of the views can be observed when women’s economic participation, political empowerment, and even sharing of unpaid household duties are addressed. Russian women and men often see themselves as equally capable to perform a variety of jobs, to be leaders, and to share housekeeping and childrearing responsibilities. Simultaneously, in the times of economic turmoil and uncertainty, women—in a very traditional way—are still ready to make way for men if the jobs are scarce. The support of the view that both partners should equally contribute to the family budget might be declining, thus recently showing a drift towards more traditional distribution of the financial duty. Both in the labour market and in politics, women’ leadership is seen acceptable if connected to the traditionally female-dominated spheres, such as culture, education, and healthcare. There is a rather universal support of the idea that women should participate in politics equally with men, while the actual representation of women on the political scene is low (e.g., less than 16% of seats occupied by women in the Parliament). Simultaneously, a significant share of population considers the number of female politicians as already sufficient. Furthermore, only just above 2% of fathers take parental leave yearly, while more than a half of the population does not find this acceptable.

If the view which directly associates gender equity and female empowerment with fertility (e.g., McDonald 2006) is accepted (and improvement of fertility would be highly desirable in the times of depopulation), then the a range of measures to reconcile careers and motherhood, or even better, parenthood, and to promote the entrance of female specialists to the male-dominated areas of the labour market, are of the utmost importance.