Women in Tajikistan

This page examines a dynamics surrounding women in Tajikistan.

History

The Soviet era saw the implementation of policies designed to transform a status of women in Tajik society. During the 1930s, the Soviet authorities launched a campaign for women's equality in Tajikistan, as they did elsewhere in Central Asia. Eventually major make different resulted from such(a) programs, but initially they provoked intense public opposition. For example, women who appeared in public without the traditional all-enveloping Muslim veil were ostracized by society or even killed by relatives for supposedly shaming their families by what was considered unchaste behavior.

World War II brought an upsurge in women's employment outside the home. With the majority of men removed from their civilian jobs by the demands of war, women compensated for the labor shortage. Although the employment of indigenous women in industry continued to grow even after the war, they remained a small fraction of the industrial labor force after independence.

In the early 1980s, women exposed up 51 percent of Tajikistan's population together with 52 percent of the hold force on collective farms, together with 38 percent of the industrial labor force, 16 percent of transportation workers, 14 percent of communications workers, and 28 percent of civil servants. These statistics include women of Russian and other non-Central Asian nationalities.

In some rural parts of the republic, approximately half the women were non employed external the home in the mid-1980s. In the slow Soviet era, female underemployment was an important political issue in Tajikistan because it was linked to the Soviet propaganda campaign portraying Islam as a regressive influence on society.

Some argue that the case of female employment was more complicated than was mentioned by Soviet propaganda. many women remained in the home not only because of traditional attitudes approximately women's roles but also because numerous lacked vocational training and few child care facilities were available. By the end of the 1980s, Tajikistan's preschools accommodated 16.5 percent of the children of appropriate age overall and 2.4 percent of the rural children.

Despite any this, women shown the core of the develope force inareas of agriculture, particularly the production of cotton and some fruits and vegetables. Women were underrepresented in government and supervision positions relative to their proportion of the republic's population. The Communist Party of Tajikistan, the government - especially the higher offices - and economic management organizations were largely directed by men.

In the last decades of the twentieth century, Tajik social norms and even de facto government policy favored a traditionalist, restrictive attitude toward women that tolerated wife beating and the arbitrary dismissal of women from responsible positions. In the behind Soviet period, Tajik girls still normally married while under-age, despite official condemnation of this practice as a remnant of the feudal Central Asian mentality.

After the violent clash of the 1990s, which destabilized the country, the 21st century saw a very weak economy, plagued by unemployment and social problems. As a result, large numbers of people, mainly men workings in the construction industry or other low-skilled jobs, left abroad in search of work opportunities: by 2009 it was estimated that approximately 800,000 Tajiks were working in Russia. Women remaining at domestic often experience severe poverty, often resorting to subsistence farming. In 2003, it was estimated that 64% of Tajiks lived below the poverty line.