Is Belarus more feminist than the West?

This statement is true at least in one aspect, namely what jobs women do.

Walking through the streets when I arrived in Belarus, something seemed strange to me. I saw many women doing mens jobs. Like construction worker or mason. The reasons for women working in such jobs may not be so nice, e.g not enough money from other jobs, but the fact that they work there is very strange to me. I never saw a female working in any hard manual labor job. Seldomly even as street cleaners.

The reasons for that might be plentyful, mostly probably that many women think that this is an umwomanly job. Or they argue that this work is too hard for women. This is one of the points where one can see that feminst debate in the West is more of a farce than actually thought through. Fighting for the right of every woman to be able to do the same jobs as men, without prejudice, most however think about business jobs and not the simple jobs that many men are doing. Maybe the feminists themselves include such jobs, but society shows that not many women even want to do them.

I don’t know how women doing mens jobs is perceived in Belarus, but at least it is a common sight. Today I saw a female foreman (or ist forewoman then?) giving instrucitons to the men on how they should repair a building. I seriously doubt that a woman in my country would have an easy job doing this. She will have very much difficulties earning the respect of the men. The stereotype is still that women are too fragile for these jobs or that they have to be fat ugly women that look like men. This is however not always the case, at least here in Belarus. This is an important lesson for both sides, Western Europe is more sexist than it appears, while Eastern Europe is more egalitarian than it appears.

3 thoughts on “Is Belarus more feminist than the West?

  1. Depends. Women do ‘mens job’, yet they’re still perceived differently. They’re often told their job is to cook soups and wash clothes, not to do any intellectual work. And they’re certainly way more discriminated in Belarus than in most of the Western European countries.

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    1. Do you mean women “should” do this housework plus a job or just do the housework? I can’t imagine that being much possible in my country, because a family can’t survive unless both work. So a woman that stays at home and does housework is a luxury.

      Also this attitude, do you think it is in all society or more prominent in certain social classes? Because I can only imagine a specific kind of men doing such comments in my country.

      However I agree that this isn’t something seen much in Western Europe. However I am uncertain how much that is out of pure necessity or if it is really progress. Are people so liberal towards women? Or don’t they want to piss off their women because they need their money too to support a family?
      Said differently, if men would earn enough money to support a family on their own in Western Europe, then they might be much more macho than they are now.

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      1. Well, typically it’s ‘plus a job’. Having lived in Belarus most of my life before moving abroad, I can say there’s difference even between how women are treated in Belarus and in Slovakia, and I’m not even talking about anything further to West.

        I heard it many times in Belarus that women aren’t supposed to be politicians, aren’t supposed to do business, aren’t clever enough to do an IT job — and when they do, they’re still sometimes seen as someone who’s taking someone else’s job, especially if it’s not, say, QA/tester or manager or sales, but a software developer.

        In Belarus, it’s still quite typical that a man comes home in the evening and just watches the TV while his wife also comes home tired but spends the evening cooking for the whole family, cleaning up the flat and doing other things. While similar can be seen in Slovakia sometimes, it seems to me less common here — maybe the society has advanced a bit further here? I have to admit things are changing slowly in Belarus too, we’re far far behind most of the Europe.

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