Feedback The list of jobs women in Russia are banned from doing will see an almost a six-fold reduction, with the ladies now getting a chance to pilot planes, drive trains and handle heavy construction machinery.
“Labor conditions at many workplaces are improving and it’s a good reason to remove the restrictions,” Valery Korzh, a high ranked Labor Ministry official, said.
An order on opening 377 earlier forbidden jobs for women is expected to go into force on the first day of 2020. The move was greenlit by the employers, the unions and the state agencies.
The Labor Ministry expected the document to cause “outrage” when it was put on public debate, Korzh said, but “the reaction turned out to be completely opposite.”
99 percent of those who commented on the draft expressed the opinion that ‘men keep telling women where to work – it’s time to allow them [the females] to work where they want’.
The changes will see Russian women employed in aviation as pilots, in shipping traffic as navigators, in transport as drivers for trains and large busses. Many new vacancies will be opened for them in the chemical industry as well.
But 79 jobs, with especially harsh physical load, are still to remain male only, the ministry ruled. This includes firefighting, mining, diving as well as repairing steam boilers and stoves, among other things.
The authorities will keep reducing this list until only the professions that endanger women’s reproductive abilities remain on it, Korzh vowed.
The list of 456 jobs forbidden to women was put together in Soviet times, back in 1974. The UN criticized that paper for infringing women’s rights on many occasions. But it’ll be thrown out the window as soon as the new regulations are introduced.