ASTANA – A woman receives a long-awaited promotion, but accepting it means moving to another city. Her husband has a career of his own. Whose job should take priority? Workplace inequality is often measured in hiring, promotions and pay. Yet some of the decisions that shape women’s careers are made far from the office, within families where professional ambitions do not always carry equal weight.
For many couples in Kazakhstan, the answer still favors the man, according to a recent analysis of nationwide survey data examining how families navigate competing professional ambitions. The analysis, by Aigul Zabirova, a professor and chief research fellow at the Kazakhstan Institute for Strategic Studies (KazISS), explores how men and women approach career decisions when work and family responsibilities collide.
Among surveyed men and women with fewer economic and professional resources, roughly six in 10 said the man’s career usually takes priority, a finding that suggests traditional gender expectations can persist even when couples frame their decisions around practical work obligations.
When work and family responsibilities conflict, 60.5% of men and 58.7% of women surveyed said the man’s career usually takes priority. The study draws on a public opinion survey commissioned by KazISS and conducted from April 10 to May 10, 2026. It covered 8,000 respondents aged 18 and older across Kazakhstan’s 17 regions and the cities of Astana, Almaty and Shymkent.
Married respondents and those living with a partner were asked whose career typically took precedence when professional and family obligations clashed, including decisions involving overtime, business trips, relocation and promotions. The difference became more pronounced among respondents with greater resources.
Researchers defined this group as respondents meeting at least two of three criteria: a university degree, a monthly income of at least 201,000 tenge (US$445) per family member, and employment as a manager, entrepreneur or self-employed person. Approximately one-quarter of adult respondents fell into this category.
Among men in this group, 64.6% said their careers took priority, compared with 51.1% of women, a 13.5-percentage-point difference in their responses. Women with university degrees were less likely to identify the man’s career as the priority, while income alone did not produce a comparable difference.
The findings point to a distinction between how families describe their arrangements and how they negotiate professional opportunities. Around one in five women surveyed in Kazakhstan said they had turned down a career opportunity for family or household reasons in the past five years, regardless of their economic or professional resources.