Women's situation at the labor market in transition (former GDR and Poland)
Friday, October 11, 2013: 5:30 PM
Dorota Witkowska, Ph.D.
,
Dept. of Econometrics & Statistics, Warsaw University of Life Sciences, Warszawa, Poland
It has been more than twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the beginning of transition in former socialist countries. The sudden exposure to competition from developed countries together with a breakdown of traditional export markets, destroyed national economies in all Central and Eastern European states. After German unification, the former GDR economy had to compete with West Germany and abroad. This caused an unprecedented increase in effective unemployment (Bonin, Zimmermann, 2000). Immediately after unification, a complete collapse of productivity and employment in East Germany was avoided only with substantial transfers from West Germany
[1]. Ten years after unification, the number of regularly employed workers in East Germany declined by almost 40%, and official German unemployment rates exceeded 19% of the labor force in the former GDR while in the former German Federal Republic this rate was less than 10% in 1999.
The aim of the research was to answer the question: How did the transitional process affect the labor market? Especially how have women in formerly socialist countries been affected by the introduction of market reforms? We focused on gender discrimination and problems related to changes in socio-economic situation in two former Soviet bloc states i.e. East Germany and Poland.
Our study found that the situation of women in both countries changed after the collapse of the communist system in Europe. Women in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) after an essential decrease in the labor market/participation rate in the early transition period became even more active than women in the Western lands. In Poland, this rate was lower than in centrally planned systems.
The aim of further investigations will be to answer the question: What are the trends in changes in women’s situation is during transitional periods and how have different modes of economic system transformation influenced women's position in the labor market.
[1] Discussion about East German unemployment can be also find in Merkl, Snower, 2008.
