Feedback The new Labor Code of Kyrgyzstan, which entered into force at the end of January 2025, generally lifted professional bans for women, while maintaining restrictions on certain professions only for pregnant and lactating women. This measure became a success of the campaign #alljobs4allwomen carried out by ADC Memorial and its partners and aimed at the abolition of discriminatory restrictions for women in employment (the so-called “lists of prohibited professions”) and the long-awaited result of many years of efforts by the civil society of Kyrgyzstan.
The #alljobs4allwomen campaign was launched in March 2017. Thanks to the efforts of human rights defenders, almost all countries in the Eastern Europe and Central Asia region, where such lists existed, took some measures to ensure gender equality in employment.
Moldova (2017) and Kazakhstan (2021) demonstrated the best practices: discriminatory articles on the lists of prohibited professions were removed from the labor codes, while guarantees for pregnant women and mothers were strengthened. Ukraine (2017) and Uzbekistan (2019) abolished only the lists of prohibited professions as such, leaving a reference to them in the labor codes. Belarus, Russia and Tajikistan chose gradually reducing the lists of banned professions without changing the labor codes. Another option was to maintain professional bans only for pregnant or lactating women, as did Azerbaijan (2023) and more recently Kyrgyzstan (2025).
In Kyrgyzstan, the struggle to overcome discrimination against women in the labor sector lasted for many years. Activists and NGOs went to demonstrations to draw attention to the problem, launched an information campaign “Your profession is your choice.” Human rights defenders have been engaged in advocacy at the international level, submitting alternative reports to the UN Human Rights Council under the Universal Periodic Report on Human Rights on Kyrgyzstan (in 2019 and 2024). The reports emphasized that the full-fledged employment of women in Kyrgyzstan, including through the abolition of 446 prohibited jobs and professions, would help reduce the dependence of the country’s economy on external labor migration, where hundreds of thousands of Kyrgyzstanis are forced to go, among whom a significant percentage are women.
In 2021, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, analyzing the level of gender equality in employment in Kyrgyzstan, recommended not only to abolish the list of professions prohibited for women, as it was called for in the coalition report by ADC Memorial and a group of NGOs from Kyrgyzstan, but also to ensure women’s real access to these jobs.
Thanks to the dialogue with civil society, the ideas of non-discrimination in employment were also accepted by the state bodies of Kyrgyzstan. Thus, in 2022, the Ministry of Labor, Social Security and Migration announced a draft regulatory act on the abolition of the list of professions prohibited for women:
“The list of jobs was adopted in 2000, and after 22 years, due to the socio-economic changes in the country, as well as the introduction of new technologies, certain types of work They have withdrawn from the scope of work related to severe, harmful and dangerous working conditions, and, consequently, have lost their relevance.”
On November 22, 2023, the Constitutional Court of the Kyrgyz Republic, at the request of K.A. Tusucheva, deciding on the constitutionality of the list of prohibited professions, recognized restrictions on women’s work as not contrary to the Constitution, but at the same time, the Court obliged the Cabinet of Ministers of the Kyrgyz Republic to ensure the reasonableness of the list of jobs, professions and positions with harmful and (or) dangerous working conditions in which the use of women’s labor is prohibited:
“These guarantees are designed to protect women from the effects of harmful industrial factors, to support them during the crucial period of pregnancy and motherhood, and in the future – to provide them with the opportunity to combine professional and family functions, which is of great social importance. Gender equality should also be manifested in compliance with the principle of equal remuneration for work of equal value, according to which work is evaluated solely according to objective criteria, regardless of who performed it – a man or a woman.”
The year 2024 brought two important legal innovations for Kyrgyzstani women: in May, Kyrgyzstan ratified ILO Convention No. 190 on the Elimination of Violence and Harassment at Work; and in December, the Jogorku Kenesh adopted a new Labor Code, implying restrictions only for pregnant and breastfeeding women.
ADC Memorial and Bir Duino Kyrgyzstan welcome the measures taken by the Government of the country to strengthen gender equality and comprehensively ensure women’s rights. However, we cannot stop there – we must continue to fight discrimination against women in employment. Job refusals or dismissals due to a person’s gender characteristics must be prevented; women must not be restricted in their career, vocational education, or their choice of employment, type of work, or profession. Women’s professional choice should be supported, and legislation should be strengthened to protect the rights of women in employment.