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Russia’s defense industry is short of tens of thousands of skilled workers.
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Traditional gender roles limit women’s participation in crucial jobs there, a report says.
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Demographic trends and policies are putting further pressure on Russia’s workforce and defense industry.
Russia’s defense manufacturing sector is short of some tens of thousands of skilled workers – and a tough stance on traditional roles for women could be part of that, according to new reports.
Two years after the war in Ukraine, Russia is boosting its military, with a record 40% of its total budget now spent on defense. It also plans to increase the number of active soldiers to 1.5 million.
That requires enormous amounts of military equipment and the infrastructure to support it.
And that requires workers, which Russia is currently finding difficult to find.
In January, Russian President Vladimir Putin boasted that more than half a million jobs have been created in the defense sector in the past year and a half alone, according to Russian state news agency TASS.
But while the jobs may be there, the workers are not.
An analysis published this week by BBC Russia found that around 90,000 defense industry-related vacancies had appeared in one month this summer, with wages far higher than average salaries.
The BBC said there are around 18,600 vacancies for operators of computer numerically controlled machines, or CNCs, which are used for shaping materials and are in high demand in manufacturing. But only 600 resumes were received for those positions, the outlet reported.
Some posts had been unfilled for months, it added.
Researcher Dara Massicot, who focuses on defense and security issues in Russia and Eurasia at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, highlighted problems with labor shortages in a recent article on how Russia is rebuilding its military.
Workers who would normally bridge the gap – such as migrants, students and prisoners – are now being used as fighters in Ukraine, she wrote.
“According to conservative estimates, wartime emigration and military mobilization cost the labor force approximately 600,000 working-age men,” Massicot said.
Russia has one largely untapped source of labor for the defense industry: women. But here’s the rub.
According to Massicot, women in Russia have been excluded from a range of professions crucial to the defense sector since the 1970s for fear of harming their fertility or pregnancy.
“Women are prohibited from entering certain occupations that are considered physically dangerous,” she wrote, giving examples such as those dealing with hazardous chemicals or heavy metals, which rule out many jobs in the defense industry.
Women are also excluded from jobs such as mining, heavy lifting, operating heavy machinery, most metallurgy and handling various chemicals, she added.
In contrast, according to the American Welding Society, 5% of U.S. welders are women—a small portion of the workforce that still amounts to tens of thousands of available workers.
“Russia would rather import foreign workers and use convicts than change its labor law (from the 1970s) to allow Russian women in certain types of jobs,” Massicot wrote on X this week.
But Russia is in a demographic spiral that predates COVID and the mass mobilization for the war in Ukraine.
By the end of 2023, Russia had a record shortage of 5 million workers across all sectors, according to an estimate by the Economic Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Reuters reported at the time.
The decline in Russia’s labor force is expected to continue until 2040, Massicot wrote.
Meanwhile, Russia is now leaning on the war to keep its economy from collapsing, increasing pressure on its workforce. Economists say the war is the only thing keeping Russia from falling into an immediate recession.
Yet Russia appears to be focusing on longer-term solutions to its demographic problems, with a strong turn toward traditional roles for women.
Putin recently reminisced about a time when women had “seven or eight children, and maybe even more,” adding that “large families should be the norm,” El País reported.
Last summer, Russian Health Minister Mikhail Murashko proposed policy changes that would reduce women’s access to abortion. He said there is a “cruel practice” of prioritizing women’s careers over children, according to El País.
This would make involving women in the defense industry a tough cultural and political pivot, Massicot said on X.
Read the original article on Business Insider
