Have you seen or heard of any stats that would give me the average > number of working hours per gender anytime prior to 1990?

RE: [CrashList] Russians polled Mark Jones Mon, 19 Mar 2001 23:34:51 -0800 > > Hi Mark, > Question: Have you seen or heard of any stats that would give me the average > number of working hours per gender anytime prior to 1990? Neither the ILO or > GSS have these stats. > Thanks, > Nicole > According to the 1987 USSR Yearbook (Novosti Press Agency, Moscow, 1987) Soviet women were conditioned by law to a 35-hour week. What that meant in practice must be open to question. My impression when living there was that people did not in general work hard and there was not much overtime. No doubt there was much moonlighting. There was speed-up and overtime when people had to reach plan targets. Women received social benefits, but were and are members of a society with a pathological degree of everyday male chauvinism. Women got partially-paid maternity leave for 12 months. 85% of children attended pre-school nurseries (this state system of provision has now collapsed). Women were relatively over-represented in the health, welfare and education sectors and under-represented in management and government. According to Novosti, 50% of engineers and up to 40% of research workers were women. I can vouch for this anecdotally. I was in the oil industry and at meetings would often meet geological survery teams with many highly-qualified women field geologists. They travelled widely, worked in diifcult an dangerous conditions, were used to to that and were accepted by others as being normal professionals. I think the great divide then and now was between town and country; people on the kolkhoz or in the provinces fared less well. Often, much less well. Sorry not to produce shovels of stats but they are probably spurious anyway. Mark