Labor markets outcomes present an important yardstick in assessing the success of democratic reforms and gender equality in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan. There is ample evidence that the growing incidence of poverty in transition economies appears to be highly correlated with declining employment and that women as a group encounter more unfavorable conditions in the labor market than men. This dissertation has focused on two issues: determinants of formal employment status and measurement of gender wage gap.; Utilizing 1999 census data, a probit model is utilized to investigate determinants of women and men's employment status. The impact of various individual characteristics such as gender, age, education, marital status, ethnicity, foreign language skills, employment status of spouse and structural factors such as urban/rural residency and geographical location are investigated. Further, a Oaxaca-Ransom decomposition is utilized to explore determinants of wages for women and men as well as wage differentials between employed women and men by utilizing the 1998 Kyrgyz Living Standards Measurement Survey.; This dissertation has documented that gender relations in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan are strained and in flux. Drastic changes in social, economic, cultural, and political life have challenged core values about gender identity, gender power, and gender relations. The empirical results indicate that: (i) gender is a significant factor in employment outcomes in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan and that women have a higher probability of unemployment than men, (ii) regional segmentation of labor markets has a negative effect both on determination of employment status and on wages of women and men, (iii) the gender wage gap is aggravated by occupational segregation and labor immobility and mitigated by human capital factors; (iv) more than two thirds of the gender wage gap is due to unexplained factors or discrimination. These findings reveal that Kyrgyzstan exhibits a trait towards masculinization of the new society and statehood, a trend similar to other transition economies.
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