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Mixed record
“The record under socialism is quite mixed,” says Charlotte Ruhe, director, small business support at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Devel- opment (EBRD). “If you look at real political and economic power across the region even today, I think women are really underrepresented. Traditional views about the woman’s role support- ing the family have persisted, while the lack of support networks made it hard for women to have a role in the econom- ic life of the country.”
“There was a history of women in leader- ship positions under state socialism; not perhaps top positions, but middle leader- ship,” says Eva Fodor, associate professor of gender studies at the Central European University in Budapest. “But that’s not the same as business leadership. The notion of a businessperson running their own business emerged after 1990 exactly at the time there was a backlash against the socialist emancipation project.”
Fodor describes the backlash as “against the notion of women working, being emancipated, joining the labour market. There was this desire of a lot of middle class women to go home and be house- wives like in Western Europe, which is
Kazakhstan’s largest lender Halyk Bank since 2009. Two women – Elvira Nabiullina and Valeria Gon- tareva – also established reputations for cleaning up the banking sectors of Russia and Ukraine respectively during their time at the helms of
the two countries’ central banks.
Financial services firm Grant Thorn- ton’s latest annual Women in Business report finds that Russia topped the list of countries with the highest proportion of senior roles held by women: 47%. In addition, all the major Russian com- panies surveyed had a woman on their senior leadership team. Across Eastern Europe the figure was 38%, up from 35% in 2016, with Estonia and Poland tied in third place with 40% of senior roles held by women.
“The region owes some of its strong performance to the legacy of communist principles which have placed women as equals for generations,” says the report.
“Although the Soviet era is often criticised by experts, one of the key achievements of this historical period
of our country was a worthy and equal status of women in society,” says Tatiana Gvilava, head of the All-Russian Public
Ambition and obstacles
Anu Viks, president of the Estonian Association of Business and Profes- sional Women (BPW), says that gener- ally Estonia has a good environment for startups, but “for female entre- preneurs it is still not so bright”.
Estonia broke decisively with its com- munist past, but the influence of nearby Scandinavia is strong. Even so, Estonian women face traditions and stereotypes leading to greater confidence in male business leaders, lower pay (the Esto- nian pay gap is the highest in Europe), making it harder for women to save money to launch a business, and the need to balance a career with unpaid work in the home leaves less time and energy to build their careers.
At the other end of the Eurasian
region, the Central Asian republic of Tajikistan has one of the largest gender development gaps in Eastern Europe, according to a World Economic Forum ranking. “The situation is very diffi- cult,” says Malika Mirzobakhodurova
of the National Association of Busi-
ness Women of Tajikistan (NABWT). “Among the obstacles preventing women from starting up their own businesses the main barriers are limited access
to finance, low literacy and educa-
tion levels, lack of support from their families and fear on the part of many women of setting up a business.”
On the other hand, the exodus of many Tajik men – especially from the poorest parts of the country – to work in Russia has created opportunities for the women left behind. “She feels she is the person responsible for her family, children, she starts to work hard, create business and grow it up,” says Mirzobakhodurova.
There is a similar phenomenon in Ukraine and other countries with high emigration levels, with women “step- ping into the vacuum” in the same way they did during the Second World War when men were called to the front, says Rania Anderson, founder of interna- tional women’s networking forum
The Way Women Work and author of “Undeterred: The Six Success Habits of Women in Emerging Economies”.
“The record under socialism is quite mixed”
ironic because it is exactly the time when women from Western Europe started to join the labour force in greater numbers.”
This is perhaps why women seem to rise to high positions – though not necessari- ly the top executive roles – in established companies in countries such as Russia, more than they tend to found top busi- nesses themselves.
Another legacy of the communist era is that “typically women were chief accoun- tants. Some ended up CEOs of banks but at the time banks were effectively account- ing for the government,” says Ruhe.
For example, Umut Shayakhmetova has headed the management board of
Organization for Businesswomen. “In our society the equality of women was entrenched in our mentality.”
Russia also performs well on Master- Card’s Index of Women Entrepreneurs, published in March. 32.6% of entrepre- neurs in Russia are female, putting it
in fourth place among 54 countries, with Hungary and Poland also rela- tively high.
Other obstacles identified by the study include “lack of financial funding/ven- ture capital, regulatory restrictions and institutional inefficiencies, lack of self- belief and entrepreneurial drive, fear of failure, socio-cultural restrictions and lack of training and education”.
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