APPROACH TO OVERCOMING BARRIERS TO WOMEN’S PARTICIPATION IN THE COUNTRY’S ECONOMIC RECOVERY

Barriers to women’s participation in economic processes can be both on the supply and demand side. Supply-side barriers include a lack of technical (hard) and socio-emotional (soft) skills, time constraints due to increased household and childcare responsibilities, limited mobility, and others.

While on the labor demand side, there may be barriers related to the mismatch of skills and education required for available jobs; gender gaps and discrimination in hiring; lack of childcare benefits, etc. In addition, factors related to social, cultural and religious norms and customs can also influence the impact of the above barriers, which often reinforce the effect of the above barriers and seriously limit women’s ability to enter or re-enter the labor market.

Furthermore, women who manage to overcome some of these barriers and find employment find it difficult to realize their potential due to wage gaps, underrepresentation in leadership, and gender-based occupational segregation.

Therefore, a systematic approach to overcoming barriers to women’s participation in the country’s economic recovery should include:

• providing affordable, quality childcare services to free up women’s time for job search and work itself;
• ensuring the dissemination of accessible information about jobs in sectors where the demand for human resources is high;
• implementation of psychological and technical support to overcome professional segregation and prepare women for future work;
• training in socio-emotional skills (soft skills), such as self-presentation, critical problem solving, business negotiation skills, etc;
• financial literacy training to ensure women’s financial self-sufficiency;
• creating career guidance programs for effective transition from student to work;
• creating a community of women leaders to implement educational programs and provide mentoring support;
• establishing a mentoring institution, especially to address the problem of professional segregation and eliminate gender gaps in career advancement;
• helping to reduce the gender pay gap in the real sector of the economy;
• combating social stereotypes about “female” and “male” professions;
• ensuring quotas for women’s representation in the management of state and municipal institutions.