Gender Effects of Transition: the Kyrgyz Republic

Gender changes in the workplace during the transition from central planning are analyzed using household survey data from the Kyrgyz Republic. As the labor market became more market-driven between 1993 and 1997, mean differences by gender in labor force participation (LFP), monthly compensation and hourly wage all narrowed. We also observe gender differences in educational attainment, labor force status, occupation and industry. Probit analysis indicates that LFP is especially high, and increasing, for college-educated women, while married women with young children are less likely to be in the workforce. Analysis of hours worked indicates significant but declining gender differences in 1993 and 1997. Earnings regressions have greater explanatory power than the hours worked model, with wage differentials generally widening between 1993 and 1997, but the gender wage gap narrows. Better-educated female white-collar workers have been the big gainers during transition, with a relatively small decline in hours worked and relatively large increase in wages. JEL categories: J16, J31, P23, O53 Contact author: Richard Pomfret School of Economics Adelaide University SA 5005 AUSTRALIA Tel: +61 8 8303 4751 Fax: +61 8 8223 1460 [email protected] GENDER EFFECTS OF TRANSITION: THE KYRGYZ REPUBLIC The position of women in formerly centrally planned economies has been a source of widespread concern. The Economist concluded an article on trafficking in women in its 26 August 2000 issue with: Since the end of Communism, women have experienced a disproportionate share of economic hardships. Two-thirds of Russia’s unemployed, for example, are women. Women have increasingly become breadwinners for drunk or absent husbands, even as they have been squeezed from the workplace thanks to industrial restructuring. Lack of opportunity compels East European women to take risks their peers in Western Europe would never contemplate. The situation is often thought to be even worse in the Islamic former Soviet republics, where a major achievement of the Soviet era was the improvement in the economic status and access to education of women, which contrasted to the situation in Soviet Central Asia’s southern neighbors (Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan). This paper addresses aspects of the economic position of women in one Central Asian country, analysing 1993-7 household survey data from the Kyrgyz Republic for differential impacts of transition on labor force participation, hours worked, and wages by men and women. In the Soviet era gender equality was guaranteed in economic spheres, although western researchers found that women worked slightly fewer hours outside the home for lower wages than could be explained by human capital models. In the political field, quotas ensured female representation, although as in the economic field a glass ceiling appears to have existed. In the social sphere, the Communist Party was especially active in Central Asia in promoting women’s education and access to work outside the home and in discouraging practices such as female seclusion and the veil. 1 See for example Swafford (1978) and Ofer and Vinokur (1992). Work on the Soviet labor force, however, tended to rely on samples drawn primarily from the European Soviet republics (eg. using interviews of Soviet émigrés, few of whom came from Central Asia). 2 Between 1921 and 1923 Soviet law was established as taking precedence over customary law. Marriage without consent and polygamy were banned, the minimum legal age for marriage was raised from nine to sixteen for brides and set at eighteen for grooms, and women were guaranteed rights to divorce. Massell (1975) is the only detailed western study on female emancipation in Soviet Central Asia. On the mass unveiling campaign (khudzhum) initiated in 1927, see also Akiner (1997, 270-1).