ASTANA – For women across Central Asia, equal rights enshrined in law do not necessarily translate into equal opportunities in everyday life, researchers said during a CAPS Unlock discussion examining barriers to women’s economic and professional advancement. Researchers and gender experts examined how deeply rooted expectations about marriage, motherhood and professional leadership continue to shape women’s choices, even as governments seek to increase their participation in economic life.
The more difficult challenge, experts noted, is ensuring that women have the freedom and institutional support to use the opportunities already available to them. The discussion was held as part of the Central Asian Think Tanks Forum organized by Paperlab in partnership with CAPS Unlock.
Photo credit: CAPS Unlock Independent researcher Dinara Nurusheva said that workplace policies intended to support parents can fall short when employers and managers continue to operate under traditional assumptions about caregiving. For her, the barriers women face in the workplace are also personal.
After she married, prospective employers repeatedly asked when she planned to have children, even though she would not become a mother until eight years later. Her experience later informed research into the “motherhood penalty,” the economic and professional disadvantages women face after having children.
Nurusheva also challenged the notion that women’s decisions to return to work, change professions or accept lower-paying jobs after maternity leave are entirely voluntary. “What is interesting is that we often frame this as an individual problem for women to solve.
A woman has to decide who will look after her child, what to do with her career and how she will earn a living. But in reality, this is a structural problem,” said Nurusheva. Moderator Bota Ayazbayeva, Dinara Nurusheva and Elmira Abylbek. Photo credit: CAPS Unlock “We often talk about choice: a woman’s choice to return to work after maternity leave, to change careers or to take a job that pays significantly less than the one she had before,” she added.
“We need to create conditions that allow women to make genuine choices.” The burden of unpaid domestic work compounds those constraints. Nurusheva said 95% of women in her research spend at least an hour a day on unpaid household labor, with some spending more than six hours.
Limited access to public childcare for children younger than three further restricts women’s options for returning to work, she said. Nurusheva called for expanded early childhood care and dedicated leave for fathers, noting that men seeking to take on greater caregiving responsibilities also encounter resistance rooted in traditional gender roles.
In Kazakhstan, for example, only 1% of men take parental leave. In Uzbekistan, similar tensions have emerged around efforts to encourage fathers to take a greater role in childcare. Kamola Alieva, an associate professor of constitutional law at Tashkent State University of Law, discussed proposed legislation providing five days of paid paternity leave in Uzbekistan.
However, she questioned whether the measure alone could change social expectations that caring for newborns is principally a mother’s responsibility.