Till not too long ago, 674 occupations throughout many sectors of Azerbaijan’s economic system had been reserved by legislation just for males. Ladies couldn’t lay asphalt, work as prepare engineers, or drive a metropolis bus with greater than 14 seats in city areas.
Chances are you’ll be asking why these restrictions exist. These restrictions, inherited from legal guidelines of the previous Soviet Union, had been meant to guard ladies’s well being however weren’t essentially primarily based on a radical threat evaluation for every job. Furthermore, they didn’t contemplate technological developments and adjustments in work and occupational well being and security requirements over the previous many years.
In November 2022, Azerbaijan repealed these restrictions on ladies’s employment, working with the World Financial institution to indicate that these roles posed no particular risk to ladies’s well being. As a substitute of across-the-board restrictions, the brand new guidelines undertake a well being risk-based method to particular jobs solely for pregnant ladies and people with youngsters underneath one 12 months of age.
Why ought to Azerbaijan or some other nation promote ladies’s work in these technical jobs?
- Equal employment alternatives: Each women and men are entitled to equal employment alternatives in all professions, as enshrined within the Structure of the Republic of Azerbaijan. The power to drive a metropolis bus or a bulldozer ought to rely upon one’s abilities, coaching, and expertise somewhat than on one’s gender.
- Ladies’s financial empowerment: Whereas ladies in Azerbaijan have increased academic attainment than males, they usually earn much less. Opening alternatives for ladies in technical roles gives them with monetary independence and fosters gender equality within the workforce.
- Advantages for companies: Having ladies in historically male-dominated fields contributes to a extra numerous and inclusive office, which will increase creativity and variety of thought, enhances understanding of the feminine client base, and helps to draw and retain different feminine staff.
- Financial development: Rising the supply of high-quality jobs for ladies is important to elevating the feminine labor provide, which is far wanted for financial development and aggressive human capital.
Past authorized reforms
The reform must be adopted by tackling deeply embedded “comfortable” limitations that impede ladies’s entry to employment in historically male-dominated sectors of the economic system.
Options to those limitations span many areas:
- Cultivating ladies’s curiosity and participation in science, expertise, engineering, and arithmetic (STEM) fields of schooling and work: STEM fields should be made extra interesting to women, and stronger connections are wanted between technical establishments and industries experiencing gender-based employment gaps.
- Bettering office phrases and situations, equivalent to creating gender-sensitive infrastructure, adopting a zero-tolerance coverage towards violence and sexual exploitation and abuse, and sexual harassment, implementing gender-blind hiring and promotion practices, and making certain equal pay for equal work.
- Addressing ladies’s disproportionate family and care tasks, which adversely have an effect on their potential to work exterior the house in jobs they could need. Males can and will assist share these tasks, whereas governments and employers can provide high quality and inexpensive baby and aged care amenities.
What’s being accomplished throughout the nation?
Many organizations in Azerbaijan are taking vital steps ahead by offering coaching for ladies in historically male-dominated professions, revising their hiring processes to make sure inclusivity, and implementing insurance policies to handle office gender-based violence and harassment.
For instance, Azerbaijan Railways and the Port of Baku – recipients of advisory providers by means of the World Financial institution’s Azerbaijan Speedy Technical Help Facility, which is financed by the European Union – are additional enhancing their respective human assets insurance policies and practices to extend the share of girls in complete and throughout male-dominated roles of their respective workforces. Some notable progress is already underway. The Azerbaijan Railways not too long ago initiated the first-ever coaching for ladies prepare operators, whereas the Port of Baku has been offering beneficiant childcare insurance policies to moms and recruiting and retaining feminine interns, amongst different actions.
Capitalizing on momentum
The World Financial institution is collaborating with Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Labor and Social Safety of the Inhabitants (MoLSPP) to conduct a number of occasions that capitalize on the present momentum and deal with these “comfortable limitations.”
Trainings on Occupational Well being and Security, and Violence and Harassment—a Gender Perspective, ready collectively with the European Financial institution for Reconstruction and Growth, included representatives of industries, universities, and MoLSPP. An e-learning model of the course is now obtainable right here.
The World Financial institution additionally held a stakeholder roundtable on selling ladies in STEM fields comprised of schooling establishments and representatives from a number of male-dominated industries. Members exchanged details about the best way to nurture feminine expertise and arrange transition routes between academic establishments and employers.
Eradicating authorized restrictions was undoubtedly an essential first step in the direction of integrating ladies in historically male-dominated sectors of the economic system, however it’s removed from sufficient. This momentum should not solely be sustained however strengthened for Azerbaijan to understand its imaginative and prescient of an equal and numerous workforce.
A handful of the previous Soviet Union nations are nonetheless carrying employment bans for ladies of their laws could wish to observe Azerbaijan’s expertise in repealing these restrictions utilizing evidence-based justification.
