State Regulation of Women's Employment and Occupational Segregation in the Russian Labour Sphere – 100 Years of History Part 1. 1918-1945
Authors:   Institute оf Economics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Baskakova Marina 
Published: March 2024

This article investigates the dynamics of gender occupational segregation, a crucial parameter that reflects the position of men and women in the workforce and significantly influences gender disparities in pay and working conditions. Over the course of our country's history, efforts have been made to reduce such segregation, highlighting the importance of collecting information to assess the effectiveness of these initiatives. The study provides a comprehensive analysis of political documents and legislative acts from both the Soviet and post-Soviet eras, aimed at promoting equal rights and, in the past three decades, equal opportunities for women and men in the labor market, which have a significant impact on gender segregation in employment. It explores the transformation of perceptions regarding the strategies, methods, and conditions necessary to achieve gender equality. In the early Soviet period, the focus was on the ideological dogmatization of maximizing women's involvement in a wide range of professions and industries. This was accompanied by labor legislation restrictions on female employment in hazardous and demanding conditions (to safeguard health) and measures to protect women during childbirth and child-rearing. During the developed socialist period, an entire system of benefits and preferences was developed to create the most favorable conditions for working women to balance their professional and family responsibilities. This included expanding the list of prohibited professions and occupations for women. In the post-Soviet era, efforts shifted toward prohibiting gender discrimination in the workplace. Labor legislation was transformed to ensure that rights, benefits, and preferences related to child-rearing and care were assigned to both mothers and fathers with family responsibilities. Rights, benefits, and preferences related to childbirth and breastfeeding assigned solely to mothers. Restrictions on female employment in hazardous and strenuous conditions have been reduced, and in some cases, these restrictions have been seen as discriminatory. Additionally, the article analyzes the dynamics of gender differences in the occupational structure of employment for women and men, drawing on historical and contemporary statistics. It reveals that despite changes in the regulation of women's work, their distribution across sectors has consistently differed significantly from that of men. However, a period from the late 1920s to the post-war years stands out as a period of substantial reduction in gender occupational segregation. Subsequently, there was a gradual increase in the level of segregation, which continued with minor fluctuations in subsequent years. 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.