Women's rights are breached in Russia, yet women have more opportunities for self-fulfillment in contemporary Russia than they had in the Soviet Union, Russian human rights veteran, Moscow Helsinki Group head Lyudmila Alexeyeva told Interfax on Tuesday.
“The women’s rights situation is not very good here. Yet women have more opportunities for self-fulfillment now than they had in the Soviet epoch,” she said on the occasion of the International Women’s Day marked on March 8.
“We still have purely female occupations, which, as a rule, are low-paid jobs: teachers and doctors,” Alexeyeva said.
“Women in the government and amongst governors are few and far between. Women are still barred from politics although women worldwide have proven they can do that job just as well as men,” Alexeyeva said.
“Compared to the Soviet era, we have more female judges nowadays. We have more women in business than in civil service and politics, but their number is still fewer than that of men. They say that business is tough and hard for women,” she said.
Things are better in public organizations unrelated to politics, Alexeyeva said.
“Women are a normal phenomenon in public organizations. I will be chairing the Moscow Helsinki Group for 20 years in May, and I am re-elected biannually. What is more, I am re-elected by men. No one says, ‘woman, keep silent’, in the civil sector,” she said.
Another human rights veteran, leader of the movement For Human Rights, Lev Ponomaryov told Interfax that the women’s rights situation was unfavorable in Russia, same as the human rights situation in general.
“I would say that family violence is the main problem in violations of women’s rights in Russia. Unfortunately, the government is not dealing with this problem,” he said.
