Gender Equality in Central and Eastern Europe : A Comparison of Labour Market Attitudes, Educational Achievement and Poverty between East and West

The transition process from centrally planned to market economies led to a dramatic fall in GDP accompanied by a tremendous increase in poverty and income inequality in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Much of the literature argues that the costs of the transition process were not distributed equally but women had to bear a higher burden. This study aims at assessing gender equality in transition countries 15 years after transition in three areas that are important for women’s economic empowerment: the labour market, education and poverty. Large and complex data sets on peoples’ attitudes and judgements and pupils’ educational achievement are analysed with different statistical methods in order to examine various aspects and determinants of gender inequality for a great set of transition countries. Pre-1990 OECD countries serve as a yardstick for the assessment of gender inequality in CEE.The value added of the study is the cross-national analysis of new data sets for the examination of gender inequality in CEE. In addition, alternative measures of gender equality are applied and compared to economic indicators generally used for the estimation of women’s disadvantage. The application of these new data sets and alternative indicators is rewarding in terms of new insights into different aspects of gender inequality in transition countries. Some results are summarised in the following. People in transition countries quite homogenously adhere to the traditional gender division of labour and differ therefore greatly from people in OECD countries who are mostly in favour of women’s work in the labour market. The great differences between East and West regarding attitudes to women’s work stand in contrast to economic indicators that suggest that transition countries reach similarly high levels of gender equality in the labour market than the West.While educational enrolment data generally used for estimating gender equality in education suggest gender parity in educational access, the indicator of educational achievement used in this study shows that it is boys and not girls who face considerable disadvantage in terms of their literacy skills. This gender gap is even greater in transition than in OECD countries.On the other hand, once the feminisation of poverty is concerned data on subjective well-being indicates that women in transition countries fare worse than men and that the relative gender gap is greater in the East than in the West. However, in contrast to the general believe that women fell more pronouncedly into poverty than men during transition subjective well-being data suggest that the gender gap in poverty incidence was already a pre-transitional phenomenon.