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Rural Reform and the Gender Gap in Post-Soviet Russia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Abstract

Using survey data from 900 rural households, this article assesses the degree to which Soviet-era workplace inequality between rural males and females has been remediated by the introduction of democratic and market reforms. The overall effects of reform institutions are mixed. Concerning male-female workplace inequality, three continuities were found with the Soviet period. First, rural males have larger total incomes than do rural females. Second, equal pay for equal work does not exist: females holding similar positions to males earned less in all categories of employment. In addition, males continue to dominate numerically the ranks of farm managers and leaders. Third, managers and leaders of both sexes are the most entrepreneurial, measured by income from private business. Male managers, however, have over three times the income from private business as do female managers. Concerning intragender inequality, it was found that females with advanced education and specialized knowledge or skills have significantly higher incomes than women with lower skill sets.

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Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2010

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References

1. See, for example, Milkman, Ruth, Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex during World War II (Urbana, 1987)Google Scholar; Humphrey, John, Gender and Work in the Third World: Sexual Divisions in Brazilian Industry (London, 1987)Google Scholar; Tomaskovic-Devey, Donald, Gender and Racial Inequality at Work: The Sources and Consequences of Job Segregation (Ithaca, 1993)Google Scholar; and Barbara Reskin and Irene Padavic, Women and Men at Work (Thousand Oaks, Calif., 1994).

2. Adaptive strategies may be “achievement oriented” (entrepreneurial) or defensive. Broad employment strategies include such behavior as mobility (moving to a new locale), exit (finding employment in a new profession), obtaining secondary employment, or retreat (reliance on the state for various transfer payments). See Yaroshenko, Svetlana, Omel'chenko, Elena, Goncharova, Natal'ya, and Issoupova, Olga, “Gender Differences in Employment Behaviour in Russia's New Labour Market,” in Sarah Ashwin, ed., Adapting to Russia's New Labour Market: Gender and Employment Behaviour (London, 2006), 134–63;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Gerber, Theodore P. and Mayorova, Olga, “Dynamic Gender Differences in a Post-Socialist Labor Market: Russia, 1991–1997,” Social Forces 84, no. 4 (June 2006): 2047–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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7. For our purposes, reform institutions comprise political and economic structures and policies—the latter defining the rules of the game and what is politically and economically permissible. In essence, reform institutions refer to the multidimensional aspects of democratic and market reform.

8. One of the seminal works on the impact of formal institutions is Douglass C. North, Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance (New York, 1990)Google Scholar. For an institutional analysis of reform as it pertains to Russia, see Braguinsky, Serguey and Yavlinsky, Grigory, Incentives and Institutions: The Transition to a Market Economy in Russia (Princeton, 2000)Google Scholar.

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10. As we use this term, rural refers to an administrative area as defined by the Russian government. Rural is not defined by predominant forms of employment or economic activity, although most rural men and women are involved in some kind of agricultural production, if not on a large farm, then on the household plot. The benefit of a localebased definition of ruralness is that it captures nonagricultural employment adaptation and nonagricultural income, an increasingly common source of income. See Lerman, Zvi, Serova, Eugenia, and Zvyagintsev, Dmitry, “Diversification of Rural Incomes and Non-Farm Rural Employment: Survey Evidence from Russia, “Journal of Peasant Studies 35, no. 1 (January 2008): 60–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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12. Calculated from Demograficheskii ezhegodnik Rossii (Moscow, 2008), 43.

13. See Bridger, “The Return of the Family Farm: A Future for Women?” 241–54. Her analysis focuses on structural impediments rather than inherent conservatism or philosophical opposition to privatization. Structural obstacles to rural adaptation predate land privatization in the postcommunist period and were found as well during land leasing under Mikhail Gorbachev. See Bridger, Sue, “Women and Agricultural Reform,” in Mary Buckley, ed., Perestroika and Soviet Women (Cambridge, Eng., 1992), 39–53 Google Scholar.

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17. The survey was conducted in the summer and fall of 2006 and was funded by the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research (NCEEER). The nine regions include Altai krai, Amur oblast, Krasnodar krai, Voronezh oblast, Moscow oblast, Leningrad oblast, Kurgan oblast, Krasnoyarsk krai, and the Republic of Tatarstan. The pretest was conducted in Kaluga oblast in the first half of 2006. A total of 34 villages in 10 raions were surveyed. One person from each household was interviewed, although information was collected about all other members in the household (both adults and children). The questionnaire included more than 100 questions on various economic, political, social, and demographic aspects. Interviews were conducted person-to-person by a research team from the Institute for Socioeconomic Studies of the Population (Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow), with a refusal rate of less than 5 percent. Households were selected from the household list of permanent residents in each village, a list kept by the village administration for all households within its jurisdiction. This list is updated annually and contains demographic and social characteristics of the households in the village. The 2006 survey employed a stratified sample in order to lessen the presence of older females and to capture more of the economically active cohort. In the survey, 52 percent of respondents were female and 29 percent of respondents were retired.

18. The most comprehensive one-volume treatment of rural women in the Soviet period is Susan Bridger, Women in the Soviet Countryside: Women's Roles in Rural Development in the Soviet Union (Cambridge, Eng., 1987)Google Scholar. See also Farnsworth, Beatrice and Viola, Lynne, eds., Russian Peasant Women (Oxford, 1992).Google Scholar

19. See Silverman, Bertram and Yanowitch, Murray, New Rich, New Poor, New Russia (Armonk, N.Y., 2000), 59–66.Google Scholar

20. Although this is a widely documented fact, for a particularly interesting and rigorous analysis, see Anderson, Barbara A., “The Life Course of Soviet Women Born 1905- 1960,” in James R. Millar, ed., Politics, Work, and Daily Life in the USSR: A Survey of Former Soviet Citizens (New York, 1987), 203–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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28. Dissatisfaction with agricultural work led women to seek nonagricultural work in rural health care and rural education, professions that paid somewhat better than unskilled agricultural work. As a result, aggregate income levels for rural women increased as the proportion of women employed in agriculture production declined. Bridger, Women in the Soviet Countryside, 24–26.

29. Mel'nikkov, V. F., ed., Ekonomika sotsialisticheskogo sel'skogo khoziaistva v sovrcmennykh usloviiakh (Moscow, 1971), 221Google Scholar; Karl-Eugen, Wadekin, “Income Distribution in Soviet Agriculture,“ Soviet Studies 21, no. 1 (January 1975): 8–11 Google Scholar. There were, of course, significant regional differences, and the data cited are national averages for the entire country.

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32. Dodge and Feshbach, “Role of Women in Soviet Agriculture,” 249–50.

33. Dunn, “Russian Rural Women,” 176. The low levels of rural women in farm leadership was contradicted by their representation and participation in policy debates in party and nonparty bodies, particularly in the areas of health, education, and welfare. See Hough, jerry F., “Women and Women's Issues in Soviet Policy Debates,” in Dallin, Atkinson, and Lapidus, , eds., Women in Russia, 355–74.Google Scholar

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35. Dodge, and Feshbach, , “Role of Women in Soviet Agriculture,” 250–51.Google Scholar

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37. Ibid., 81.

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40. Bridger, “The Return of the Family Farm,” 244–45, where she cites the fact that among newlywed rural women in 1988, one-half prepared the food single-handedly, and

40. percent received no help at all with washing and cleaning.

41. Although there were limits on the amount of land that a household could use for food production, this “private” sector was unregulated by the state, that is, production was not planned and prices were not set by the state. The vast majority of private plot production was consumed as nonmonetary income, but about 10 percent of households sold some of their produce, thereby earning supplementary monetary income. There were significant regional differences in the operation of and production from private plots, with kolkhozniki families in Lithuania and Georgia having the highest average monetary income from private plot production in the late 1980s. See Lichnoe podsobnoe khoziaistvo naseleniia v 1988 godu (Moscow, 1989), 68Google Scholar. Notable differences also existed according to the level of development and economic strength of the village, and, of course, according to the sociodemographic characteristics of the household. See Kaiugina, Zemfira I., Lichnoe podsobnoe khoziaistvo v SSSR: Sotsial'nye reguliatory i rezul'taty razvitiia (Novosibirsk, 1991), chap. 4.Google Scholar

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43. Bridger, Women in the Soviet Countryside, 110. These data are averages; due to the size of the RSFSR there was considerable regional variation.

44. Kaiugina, Lichnoe podsobnoe khoziaistvo v SSSR, 109.

45. Biudzhet vremeni naseleniia SSSR: Statisticheskii sbornik (Moscow, 1989), 28; and Kolkhozy SSSR: Kratkii statisticheskii sbornik (Moscow, 1988), 214Google Scholar. A different publication indicates that in 1988 kolkhoznik women still put in more hours than men on the household plot, although both sources agree that from the mid-1970s to the late Soviet period men increased their labor on the plot. According to this source, from 1975 to 1988 kolkhoznik men increased the amount of time they spent working on the household plot from 11.7 percent of their total work time in 1975 to 18.9 percent of their time in 1988. Conversely, kolkhoznik women's time allocation to the household private plot did not change significantly, from 30.5 percent of their time in 1975 to 28.7 percent in 1988. rabochikh, Biudzhet, sluzhashchikh i kolkhoznikov v 1975–1988 gg. (Moscow, 1989), 212Google Scholar.

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48. Kay, , Men in Contemporary Russia, chap. 3; and Marina Kiblitskaya, “Once We Were Kings: Male Experience of Loss of Status at Work in Post-Communist Russia,” in Ashwin, ed., Gender, State, and Society in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia, 90–104 Google Scholar.

49. Yaroshenko, Omel'chenko, Goncharova, and Issoupova, “Gender Differences,“ 161.

50. Cited in Gerber and Mayorova, , “Dynamic Gender Differences in a Post-Socialist Labor Market,” 2051. 51. Sabrina P. Ramet, The Liberal Project and the Transformation of Democracy: TheCaseof East Central Europe (College Station, 2007), 92.Google Scholar

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53. Sperling, Valerie, Organizing Women in Contemporary Russia: Engendering Transition (Cambridge, Eng., 1999), 155.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

54. Bridger, Sue and Kay, Rebecca, “Gender and Generation in the New Russian Labour Market,” in Pilkington, Hilary, ed., Gender, Generation and Identity in Contemporary Russia (London, 1996), 23–35 Google Scholar.

55. Silverman, and Yanowitch, , New Rich, NewPoor, New Russia, 73–74; Sperling, Organizing Women in Contemporary Russia, 148–58.Google Scholar

56. Bridger, “Rural Women and the Impact of Economic Change,” 42–49.

57. Ashwin, Sarah, “The Post-Soviet Gender Order: Imperatives and Implications,” in Ashwin, , ed., Adapting to Russia's Nexv Labour Market, 50.Google Scholar

58. Weiner, Elaine, Market Dreams: Gender, Class, and Capitalism in the Czech Republic (Ann Arbor, 2007), 18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

59. Ibid., 71.

60. Ibid., 113.

61. Kozin, Irina and Zhidkova, Elena, “Sex Segregation and Discrimination in the New Russian Labour Market,” in Ashwin, ed., Adapting to Russia's Neiv Labour Market, 83.Google Scholar

62. Peterson, V. Spike, A Critical Rewriting of Global Political Economy: Reproductive, Productive and Virtual Economies (London, 2003), 31, 111.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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65. Among the changes: a reduction in the number of people employed on large farms, an increase in the number of people employed on small agricultural enterprises, an increase in the number of people employed as or by private farmers, an increase in the educational level of people working in rural localities due to out-migration from urban areas and migrant resettlement, an increase in rural unemployment, and an increase in the duration of rural employment. See Vlasova, N., “O polozenii na rynke truda v sel'skoi mestnosti,” Ekonomist, no. 9 (September 2001): 89–92.Google Scholar

66. Moreover, the Soviet-era welfare state benefits were degraded society-wide, giving way to relatively high unemployment and the rise of mass poverty among rural dwellers. Bridger, “Rural Women and the Impact of Economic Change,” 45–49.

67. O'Brien, David J. and Patsiorkovsky, Valery, Measuring Social and Economic Change in Rural Russia: Surveys from 1991 to 2003 (Lanham, Md., 2006), 58–59 Google Scholar.

68. Sel'skoe khoziaistvo Rossii (Moscow, 1995), 11Google Scholar; Itogi vserossiiskoi sel'skokhoziaistvennoi perepisi 2006 goda, vol. 2, Chislo ob'ektov perepisi, trudovye resursy, 206, 268, 334. This latter number includes permanent and seasonal agricultural workers employed on large, medium, and small agricultural enterprises and private farmers.

69. We use monetary incomes to measure income inequality, although we acknowledge that nonmonetary income is an important component in overall household welfare, and we note that nonmonetary income increased as a share of total household income for rural families during the 1990s. See, for example, O'Brien, David J., Patsiorkovsky, Valery V., and Dershem, Larry D., Household Capitaland the Agrarian Problem inRussia (Burlington, Vt., 2000), chap. 9.Google Scholar We justify using monetary incomes because this measure provides a sense of how successfully the different sexes adapted to new economic opportunities. Moreover, nonmonetary income primarily consists of food consumption from the household plot and is not available for expenditure (although food may be bartered for services). Thus, monetary income is a better indicator of purchasing power and provides a more accurate picture of one individual's relative economic advantage.

70. See Gerber, and Mayorova, , “Dynamic Gender Differences in a Post-Socialist Labor Market,” 2060–62.Google Scholar

71. “Other” sources of income primarily include assistance from family or relatives and are not considered economic activity, although these sources were substantially higher for husbands, which may merely reflect who requested assistance or who was the recipient for the household.

72. Serova, Lerman, and Zvyagintsev, , “Diversification of Rural Incomes and Non- Farm Rural Employment,” 60–79 Google Scholar.

73. This cross-sectional survey of 800 rural households in five regions was conducted during the second half of 2001. Those five regions include: Belgorod oblast, Krasnodar krai, Novgorod oblast, Volgograd oblast, and the Chuvash Republic. The pretest of the questions was conducted in June 2001 in Riazan’ oblast, followed by the full survey during July-October 2001. Within each of the five regions, four villages were selected within a raion, for a total of 20 villages. Within each village, 40 households were surveyed, for a total sample of 800 households (160 households in each region).

74. The highest rate of unemployment is for wives less than 20 years of age (14.3 percent), but this is an age bracket in which wages would be the lowest anyway. Wives aged 21–29 Google Scholar and 30–39 have an unemployment rate of 3.2 percent, those aged 40–49 have 5.1 percent, and those aged 50–59 have 1.5 percent.

75. The 2006 survey collected information on up to five adults in each household: the husband and wife, plus up to three additional adults.

76. Among the 900 households surveyed, 48 percent (436) had one additional adult, 20 percent (178) had a second additional adult, and 5 percent (42) had a third additional adult. The remainder (244) had no additional adults. Less than 38 percent of these first additional adults had any employment at all, including: 37 percent who were employed full-time, less than 1 percent held part-time work, another 37 percent were retired, 7 percent were unemployed, and 12 percent had student status; the remaining percentage was distributed among the disabled, homemakers, and women on childcare leave. Of these first additional adults, 55 percent were male and 45 percent female. Of the second additional adults, only 35 percent were employed (full-time), 29 percent were retired, 10 percent were unemployed, 17 percent were students, and the remainder was distributed among the disabled, homemakers, students, and women on childcare leave. Among second additional adults, 27 percent were male and 73 percent female.

77. For the first additional adult, managers n = 5, specialists n = 17, clerks n = 29, farmworkers n = 109, private farmers n = 1, and self-employed n = 25. For the second additional adult, managers w = 1, specialists n = 6, clerks n = 22, farmworkers n = 31, private farmers n = 0, and self-employed n = 22.

78. Among first additional adults, males employed as farmworkers earned a mean of 5,222 rubles a month, versus 2,645 rubles for females. Among second additional adults, males earned a mean of 4,791 rubles a month, whereas females earned 2,668 rubles.

79. In addition, there is persuasive evidence of sex-linked income inequality across professions and other sectors of the economy during the Soviet period, not just in agriculture. See McAuley, , Women's Work and Wages in the Soviet Union, 11–31 Google Scholar

80. Not all scholars share the view that the private sector may rectify income inequality. Sue Bridger was skeptical from the start of reform and argued that there were “few grounds for optimism that women's position might be improved through an ostensible change in property relations.” See Bridger, “Rural Women and the Impact of Economic Change,” 42.

81. Rossiia v tsifrakh (Moscow, 2009), 237Google Scholar. Nationwide, more than 17 percent of all private farms (49,185) do not have any land at all. There is an extreme concentration of land, capital, and labor in a small percentage of farms: less than 2 percent of private farms account for 50 percent of all land used by private farmers. L. Kirkorova, “Krestianskie (fermerskie) khoziaistva: Tranformatsionnye protsessy, problemy zemlepol'zovaniia,“ APK: Ekonomika, upravlenie, no. 4 (April 2008): 38. The private farm association AKKOR, which is the primary provider of technical assistance and advice on the ground, estimates that one-third of its regional organizations “exist only on paper.” “Doklad Prezidenta AKKOR Vladimira Nikolaevicha Plotnikova na XIX s'ezde AKKOR,” Fennerskoe samoupravlenie, nos. 3–5 (May 2008): 7.

82. Using data from the 2006 agricultural census, there were. 01 private farms per one rural dweller on average nationwide. Regional variations existed, and in northern areas the ratio is even less.

83. It is not uncommon for private farms to exist on paper but not to produce anything in reality. In fact, in the 2006 agricultural census it was found that of the 285,000 private farms that were registered during 1991–2005, only 147,500 were engaged in agricultural production. “Postanovlenie XIX s'ezda AKKOR” at www.akkor.ru (accessed 11 June 2008; no longer accessible).

84. Sue Bridger was among the first to speculate on the difficulties female private farmers would encounter. See Bridger, , “The Return of the Family Farm,” 241–54.Google Scholar

85. This conclusion is indirectly supported by the fact that households in which the wife is self-employed have the highest mean number of members, 3.9 members, and the second highest mean number of pensioners, 58.

86. Women with 0 - 6 years of education had a mean of 1,598 rubles a month in earned income, women with 7–9 years of income had 1,808 rubles, women with 10- 11 years of education had 3,753 rubles, and women with 12+ years of education had earned monthly income of 4,318 rubles, or nearly 2.5 times the level of the least educated.

87. Gerber, and Mayorova, , “Dynamic Gender Differences in a Post-Socialist Labor Market,” 2062–65.Google Scholar

88. Kay, , Men in Contemporary Russia, 75.Google Scholar

89. Ibid.

90. Marsh, , “Introduction,” 7.Google ScholarPubMed

91. Fodor, Eva and Vicsek, Lilla, “A Different Type of Gender Gap: How Men and Women Experience Poverty,” East European Politics and Societies 20, no. 1 (February 2006): 14–39 Google Scholar.

92. Another type of response to new opportunities is the expansion of landholdings, defined as real land, not paper land shares. We are not able to analyze land expansion because the survey did not ask in whose name the title to land was held or which individual obtained additional land, and thus gender differences in landholdings and their expansion cannot be analyzed in a meaningful way. Households relying mostly on salary and food sales as the main sources of income expand their landholdings the least, including households of ordinary farmworkers. Households in the upper income brackets and those with significant income from nonagricultural business have the largest mean increases in real land, mosdy rental land.

93. Hellman, Joel S., “Winners Take All: The Politics of Partial Reform in Postcommunist Transitions,” World Politics 50, no. 2 (January 1998): 203–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

94. See Wegren, Stephen K., O'Brien, David J., and Patsiorkovsky, Valery, “Winners and Losers in Russian Agrarian Reform,” Journal of Peasant Studies 30, no. 1 (October 2002): 1–29 Google Scholar.

95. In terms of age, for both sexes the mean business income is highest in the 40-49 age bracket, followed by the 30–39 bracket.

96. Demograficheskii eihegodnik Rossii (Moscow, 2008), 103.Google Scholar

97. For example, in 2008, pension-aged rural women made up 29 percent of the total female population in the countryside, while pension-aged men composed only 13 percent of the rural male population. Calculated from Demograficheskii ezhegodnik Rossii (Moscow, 2008), 43Google Scholar.