1.
What is Good, Bad, and What
Could be Done with Gender
Equality in Belarus
Lev Lvovskiy, BEROC

2.
What is Good: Inheritance of the USSR
• Belarus is relatively high on Gender Development Index (31st position)
• 49.7% of women are in labor force
• top 3 among the developed nations after Lithuania 50.6 and Latvia 50.1.
Sweden 47.7 and the US 45.8
• Unadjusted Gender wage gap is moderate at 0.737
• Compared to 0.842 in Sweden, 0.722 in the US and 0.691 in Russia
• Unexplained gender wage gap is very low and some times is found to
be negligible

3.
What is Bad
• Life expectancy gap is big: 79 years for women Vs 68.6 for men
• Gender-related policies in laws
• Military draft
• Maternity leave
• Population is still largely patriarchic
• National Assembly composition: 27%-32% of women
• Women spend twice as much time housekeeping as men
• Women spent 3 times time the men do rearing children

4.
Leviathan of GI: Maternity Leave
• Three years -- one of the longest paid leaves in the world
• Paternity leave varies from 0 to several weeks
• 95% of women take full three years
• Human capital deteriorates by 30-60% depending on industry
• Childcare benefit is decreased if a woman goes back to work
• Equilibrium effects: lack of childcare before age 3, undeveloped
institute of nannies
• Speculation: this is one of the latent fertility policies

5.
Patriarchic Views and Values
• Fertility-boosting policies and government promote view of a woman
as a stay-at-home mom (despite contradicting reality)
• Interesting finding: promotion of patriarchic values from the top
create discrepancy in trends of views vs real behavior
• Although women are well-represented in parliament, they usually
take “traditional roles” there – medicine, education, family policies

6.
Women and Private Business
• High numbers of female entrepreneurs (30%)
• Most are in small or very small firms (10.6 employees vs 17.3 for men)
• Decision to start an enterprise is highly correlated with maternity leave
• On average much smaller growth rates than in men-headed firms (7.6% vs
27.1% for men)
• Female entrepreneurs take 3 times less credits than male entrepreneurs
• Female entrepreneurs often city “double shifts” (at work and at home) as
one of the most important barriers

7.
Ways to Improve
• Make women and men be equal under the law
• Modify maternity leave policy, divorce laws, army draft
• Promote gender equality views especially given people accept some
of the points more than they believe to
• More research in needed on gender inequality issues, and particularly
on gender inequality in business and entrepreneurship
• Speculation from personal experience: when talking to government
representatives it is more important to show practical economic
benefits of gender policies rather than to point to the human rights