WOMEN IN UNFAVORABLE WORKING CONDITIONS: SYSTEM PROBLEMS AND NEW CHALLENGES
Despite the notable success of the Russian authorities in improving working conditions, a large number of people continue to work in unfavorable conditions. This problem is particularly important when we speak about women, since their status in terms of labor and employment is more vulnerable than that of men. On the one hand, women have many restrictions related to reproductive health, and on the other hand, they are in a state of a “double burden”, when they have to combine paid work and family responsibilities. This fact predetermined the main idea of the article, which is to identify some actual problems of women in modern Russia who face poor working conditions. In order to achieve this goal, the quality of working environment and work process was considered in the context of subjective perception and objective circumstances, with sanitary conditions being the key factor. The study is based on the official statistics and monitoring data of the qualitative state of labor potential of the Vologda region population. The analysis showed that unfavorable working conditions not only have a negative impact on women’s health, but also lead to underutilization of accumulated potential, lack of career focus, avoidance of creative activity, perception of work as a necessary need, and common social passivity. The reasons for this are closely related to the subjective perception of the environment, where individual labor market behavior has an important role to play. At the same time, transformational processes in the sphere of employment contribute to increasing both the number of women whose work is associated with a high burden of the work process and uncertainty in the area of promoting decent work as a whole.