Women in the labor market. Female business practices (1994)

In 1994, a sociological survey «Women in the Labor Market. Female Business Practices» was conducted in Naberezhnye Chelny (developer and manager E.V.Mashkova, Ph.D. in Economics).

The transition to a free market economy created totally new macrosocial employment conditions for the entire able-bodied population, including women. The conditions of a monoindustrial city, as Naberezhnye Chelny is, with its infrastructure underdeveloped and its lack of professional opportunities, have determined the specific female labor behavior and hampered adjustment to the new economic circumstances. The importance of the theme both for our city and nationwide lay in such phenomena as women’s private business, self-employment, and nonstate economy sector employment being new and unexplored.

The sociological survey will include: analyzing the impact of the new macroeconomic conditions on the dynamics of socio-demographic characteristics of working women; studying work practices of the city’s businesswomen; studying tax and credit encouragement of female private business and creation of new jobs for women.

The survey report consists of the following parts:

Conclusion. Major activities aimed at encouraging female private business and businessmen offering jobs for women.

The main survey conclusion are as follows:

«Psychologically, women are worse prepared to compete for jobs. As the survey reveals, women are less demanding as to a job type and more easily reconciled to low wages; typically, women have an understated self-appraisal and a relatively weak vocational orientation, and are reluctant to perform any job which involves decision-making. As a result, women’s position appears to be that of a social outsider. Concerning legal guarantees, the Employment Act provides for hardly any special measures to ease job competition for women.

There are a few ways that seem to be most effective in integrating women in the labor market and asserting their right to proper work:

1. To encourage female private business. Worldwide, female business have been developing by far more rapidly than male business.

2. To create new jobs for women through developing the city infrastructure by setting up, first and foremost, private businesses. It is necessary to form a permanent training and retraining system for women, with emphasis on the professions that would ensure their being taken on newly created jobs.

3. To make sure that as many women as possible preserve their current jobs. The following administrative measures can be used to this end

- a regulation providing that any form of business should have a definite portion of women on its staff or should not have more than 50 % of women among those made redundant, with the established gender-related employment structure taken into consideration;

- legislative acts providing for a system of fines for female redundancies, which would force administrations to have their female workers retrained and to keep them employed.

The key principle of employment policies should be active employment regulation, that is, not only encouragement of employers, but also working out jobs development policies and creating mechanisms which would balance jobs supply and demand.»

The main findings of this survey and relevant recommendations may be found in «Content Analysis of Women’s Situation in the Area of Employment Over a Period from 1989 through 1999» which will be published in March of 2002.