Women-only prize honors peacemakers Little has changed. A nationwide survey conducted by the online Monitoring. This year there is much discussion of Russia's demographic crisis, and the subtext is that women are chiefly to blame for it. The country's population is shrinking by about 1 million people annually, largely due to a post-Soviet cocktail of bad news, including war, alcoholism, drug addiction, industrial accidents, disease, and stress. The birthrate has plummeted from a healthy 2.6 kids per woman in 1958 to just 1.1 last year.
Women say their status has fallen over the past decade.
Working women are seen as almost unpatriotic. There is little sympathy for the ideas of equal rights in the labor market. Well, that's the social debate that must begin one day. The more educated and qualified a woman, the more likely she is to have been pushed down or squeezed out altogether from her place in the past 10 years. Two-thirds of Russia's jobless are female.