Sex, Politics, and Putin by Valerie Sperling;

Author:Valerie Sperling; [Valerie Sperling]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780199324347
Publisher: OxfordUP
Published: 2014-09-17T19:18:00+00:00

Sex Discrimination in Russia: Feminists’ Views

Feminist activists, interviewed in 2012, talked readily about the sex-based discrimination that they perceived in politics and economics and that, in some cases, they had experienced personally. First, like their political activist counterparts whose groups were not explicitly focused on sex-based discrimination, feminist activists pointed to the striking absence of women in politics. As one anti-violence activist, Irina Fetkulova, put it: “Nobody wants to—well, not nobody—people don’t really want to see a woman in power.”53 Feminists also fluently referred to the widespread labor discrimination described above. One 23-year-old feminist activist in Moscow summed the situation up as follows:

In Russia, even according to official statistics, they acknowledge that there’s a 35 percent gap in pay for equal work on average. The state statistics on rape are very strongly reduced. But they don’t even consider it necessary to hide labor discrimination, it doesn’t even occur to anyone to hide it. Therefore, the statistics about differences in salary are collected and are openly available. Women also encounter an enormous amount of discrimination in hiring. That is, if a young woman has children, she can be refused work because she has children. If she doesn’t have children, they’ll tell her that they won’t hire her because she could become pregnant. And therefore, young women are the first to be fired when there are staff cuts… . Another big problem concerns mothers who go on maternity leave (dekretnyi otpusk), because an enormous number of employers don’t pay the maternity benefits; they use the law to try to avoid paying the benefits… . And there’s another big problem—the list of jobs forbidden [to women].54

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