{"id":13853,"date":"2017-12-23T11:08:57","date_gmt":"2017-12-23T08:08:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/adcmemorial.org?p=13853"},"modified":"2023-01-18T12:30:32","modified_gmt":"2023-01-18T09:30:32","slug":"euromaidan-press-ukraine-s-health-ministry-opens-up-previously-banned-450-professions-for-women","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adcmemorial.org\/en\/news\/publications-about-us\/media-about-us\/euromaidan-press-ukraine-s-health-ministry-opens-up-previously-banned-450-professions-for-women\/","title":{"rendered":"EUROMAIDAN PRESS: Ukraine\u2019s Health Ministry opens up previously banned 450 professions for women"},"content":{"rendered":"
The Ukrainian Health Ministry has abolished its order #256 banning women from being employed in 450 professions which were considered damaging to women\u2019s health, Ukrainian MP Iryna Suslova wrote<\/a> on her fb page. Suslova was one of the politicians engaged in lobbying for the abolition of the document, which created discriminatory conditions for women\u2019s employment opportunities. According to her,<\/div>\n

\u201cBasically, it [the order] took away their freedom of choice and placed them in unequal conditions related to men. The abilition of the order must become the first step on the path of non-discrimination of women in\u00a0labor relations. Next comes creating safe working conditions for all people, regardless of gender, combating gender segregation during employment and eliminating sexism at work.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Earlier, Suslova said<\/a> that another goal\u00a0for women\u2019s equality is abolishing order #241, which restricts the maximum weight women can lift in the workplace to 7-10 kg, closing the doors to many professions.<\/p>\n

The list of professions banned for women goes back to Soviet times and restricts professions which were considered to be damaging to reproductive health. It prohibits from employing women in gas welding, as carpenters, operators of excavators, lumberjacks, train drivers, motorists on ships, long-haul bus or lorry drivers, divers, firefighters, make parts for copper wind instruments etc.<\/p>\n

From Soviet times<\/h4>\n

Similar prohibitions are enacted in many other former Soviet countries (Belarus, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, countries of Central Asia). In Russia, where the list includes also over 450 professions, the human rights center Memorial<\/em> spearheaded a campaign called \u201cAll jobs for all women<\/a>,\u201d the goal of which was to\u00a0cancel lists of types of jobs and professions banned to women in all Eastern European and Central Asian countries.<\/p>\n

In Ukraine, the ban conflicted with the existing national leglisation on non-discrimination. Moreover,\u00a0some of the prohibitions were contradictory and were not observed in practice. For instance, legally women were allowed to drive transport vehicles\u00a0carrying\u00a0under 14 passengers \u2013 why not 15 or 16? In practice, women in Ukraine do drive buses and trams, but not\u00a0metro trains. During round tables, metro representatives defended the anti-metro rule by listing presumable negative effects of noice and vibrations on women\u2019s reproductive health; however, the same noise and vibrations affect the many women working on lower-paid positions in the metro. Yet another rule, which restricted women from working from 22:00 to 6:00, goes back to 1919, when women and men were prohibited from\u00a0staying together during the night. It, too, is not enforced in practice, as any customer of a 24-hour supermarket in Ukraine may observe.<\/p>\n

Most countries of the world don\u2019t have labor restrictions for women, which is explained by international human rights treaties: the\u00a0Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. All of them don\u2019t recommend banning women or men from working in certain professions. In its \u201cEqual treatment directive<\/a>\u201d from 2006, the EU\u00a0implements the principle of\u00a0equal treatment\u00a0between men and women in\u00a0EU labour law, which specifices that in private and public work relations \u201cno direct or indirect discrimination on grounds of sex in the public or private sectors, including public bodies<\/em>,\u201d is allowed, \u201cwhatever the branch of activity and at all levels of the professional hierarchy<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

According <\/a>to Memorial\u2019<\/em>s Stefaniya Kulaeva, who on 8 March 2017 held a workshop for Eastern Partnership states \u2013 Georgia, Armenia, Moldova, and Ukraine \u2013 on implementing EU anti-discrimination norms, only Georgia was able to change the existing practice by amending not the lists but the Labor Code, which prohibited the professions only for pregnant or nursing women. Now the majority of Georgian women are able to work in previously banned professions. Ukraine is the next country to change the existing practice of professions banned for women, having already given women the right to serve in combat positions<\/a>\u00a0in June 2016.<\/p>\n

Not unanimous<\/h4>\n

A campaign to abolish the gender-based labor prohibitions unraveled in the summer of 2017. Not all Ukrainian experts agreed with abolishing the restrictions. In June 2017, the Ministry of Health and the National Academy of Medical Sciences of Ukraine held a meeting called\u00a0\u201cLabor hygene and professional illnesses<\/a>,\u201d where the present experts\u00a0released a Memorandum stating that the practice of restricting women\u2019s work in specific areas of work was not discriminatory, that completely removing restrictions on women\u2019s labor in hazardous conditions \u201cwill lead to a significant increase among them of the risks of work-related violations of general and reproductive health, an increase in professional diseases that will negatively affect the demographic situation, population health, and the gene pool of the nation of Ukraine<\/em>\u201d and instead of abolishing the list, called to revise it. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian Institute of Labor had even\u00a0recommended to <\/a>expand the list of restricted professions.<\/p>\n

However, human rights experts and sociologists actors stress that the restrictions are discriminatory. Iryna Virtosu, the editor-in-chief of the Human Rights Information Center portal, explained\u00a0<\/a>that women are already employed in the prohibited professions, but don\u2019t receive the social benefits they should, as officially they are employed in other, less strenous positions. Sociologist Tamara Martsenyuk stresses<\/a> that prohibiting specific professions for women based on potential harm to their reproductive health leads to financial inequality between women and men who work in the same segment of the market and sends the signal that women are only valued as mothers, not workers. As well, Martsenyuk says that\u00a0men\u2019s reproductive health is not given enough attention, creating the impression that men are impenetrable creatures\u00a0called to earn money.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe situation when care for women is expressed by\u00a0a number of prohibitions, shows women citizens as dependent and\u00a0dull creatures who will harm themselves if they are not taken care of. Taking profits into account, the direct consequence of such a distribution\u00a0a labor market with areas of activity that are accessible only to men,\u00a0which start to be better paid for.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n

If many of the prohibitions in the Ukrainian list of banned professions were indeed hard to explain, that doesn\u2019t mean that working conditions have no impact on women\u2019s reproductive health at all. The\u00a0meta-review <\/a>of occupational risk factors for reproductive health of women published in Occupational Medicine<\/em> in 2006 states that, apart of well-known\u00a0negative effects of chemicals and physical workloads on pregnant women, women\u2019s fertility and ability to carry the pregnancy to term is influenced by exposure to lead,\u00a0mercury, nickel, and manganese, solvents,\u00a0disinfectants, anaesthetic gases, and other pharmaceutic drugs, heavy workloads, irregular work hours, working during the night or in shifts, and work stress. However, the study says, the research is often inconclusive due to methodological restraints, and advises more research be done on the matter.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Read the full article<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Ukrainian Health Ministry has abolished its order #256 banning women from being employed in 450 professions which were considered damaging to women\u2019s health, Ukrainian MP Iryna Suslova wrote on her fb page. Suslova was one of the politicians engaged…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[636],"tags":[208],"strategy_cases":[],"campaign":[529],"archive":[],"filter-content":[],"regions":[436],"class_list":["post-13853","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media-about-us","tag-womens-rights-en","campaign-all-jobs-for-all-women-en-news","regions-ukraine"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"featured_image_urls_v2":{"full":"","thumbnail":"","medium":"","medium_large":"","large":"","1536x1536":"","2048x2048":"","pub-thumb":"","post-thumb":"","wcicon":"","wcsquare":"","wcsmall":"","wcstandard":"","wcbig":"","wcfixedheightsmall":"","wcfixedheightmedium":"","wcfixedheight":"","wccarouselsmall":"","wccarousel":"","wcslider":""},"post_excerpt_stackable_v2":"

The Ukrainian Health Ministry has abolished its order #256 banning women from being employed in 450 professions which were considered damaging to women\u2019s health, Ukrainian MP Iryna Suslova wrote on her fb page. Suslova was one of the politicians engaged in lobbying for the abolition of the document, which created discriminatory conditions for women\u2019s employment opportunities. According to her, \u201cBasically, it [the order] took away their freedom of choice and placed them in unequal conditions related to men. The abilition of the order must become the first step on the path of non-discrimination of women in\u00a0labor relations. Next comes creating…<\/p>\n","category_list_v2":"Media about us<\/a>","author_info_v2":{"name":"admin3","url":"https:\/\/adcmemorial.org\/en\/author\/admin3\/"},"comments_num_v2":"0 comments","amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adcmemorial.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13853","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adcmemorial.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adcmemorial.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adcmemorial.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adcmemorial.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13853"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/adcmemorial.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13853\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13854,"href":"https:\/\/adcmemorial.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13853\/revisions\/13854"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adcmemorial.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adcmemorial.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adcmemorial.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13853"},{"taxonomy":"strategy_cases","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adcmemorial.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/strategy_cases?post=13853"},{"taxonomy":"campaign","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adcmemorial.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/campaign?post=13853"},{"taxonomy":"archive","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adcmemorial.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/archive?post=13853"},{"taxonomy":"filter-content","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adcmemorial.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/filter-content?post=13853"},{"taxonomy":"regions","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adcmemorial.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/regions?post=13853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}