Women in Bulgaria

Women in Bulgaria refers to women who live in and are from Bulgaria. Women’s position in Bulgarian society has been influenced by a variety of cultures and ideologies, including the Byzantine and Ottoman cultures, Eastern Orthodox Christianity, communist ideology, and contemporary globalized Western values.

Emancipation

Bulgarian women live in a society that is customarily patriarchal. While Bulgaria is often described as a patriarchal society, women may have substantial authority in household budgeting or agricultural decision making. Both men and women have the right to vote and own property. Despite decades of socialist ideology of gender equality, women are often employed in lower paying jobs, remain responsible for most household chores, and represent more than half the registered unemployed. They also occupy leadership positions less frequently than men. In 1996, fewer than 14 percent of postsocialist parliamentary representatives have been women, and only one in five municipal councilors were women in that year. By 2014, women represented 20.4% of the Parliament.

Voting and government

Limited women’s suffrage was first granted in 1937, and women obtained full voting rights in 1944.[7] During the communist era nevertheless, civil rights and freedoms for both women and men were equal, no matter how limited they were due to the authoritarian nature of the government. In 1945 the first women were elected in parliament. Between 1960-1990 the number of women in parliament varied between 16% and 21% and in 1990 it dropped down to 8.5%. As of 2017, there were 25.8% women in parliament.

Employment

Many women entered paid employment during the socialist era, when an ideology of gender equality was promoted, and they made up nearly half the workforce in the late twentieth century. Women are frequently employed as teachers, nurses, pharmacists, sales clerks, and laborers, and less often involved in management, administration, and technical sciences. Women are also largely responsible for household tasks child care, cooking, cleaning, and shopping. Agricultural labor is divided according to gender, with men working with animals and machinery and women doing more hand labor in crop production, although flexibility exists in response to specific situations.

Despite this, the gender segregation in the workforce is somewhat less pronounced in Bulgaria than in other European countries.

Compared to the European average, Bulgarian women have a higher involvement in traditionally male fields such as science, maths, computing and engineering; and a lower involvement in the service field.

Also, the gender pay gap (in 2013) is 13.0% in Bulgaria, which is lower than the European Union average of 16.2%.[9] As of 2014, the employment rate (age 15-64) for women was 58.2% while for men it was 63.9%.

The employment rate for both sexes has been relatively low during the past two decades, due to hardships experienced by the national economy after the fall of the communism. Nevertheless, the exact involvement in the labour force is quite difficult to determine, due to the presence of the unregulated informal sector. According to World Bank, women in 2014 made up 46.6% of the total labour force, pretty much the same as in 1990 (47.9%).

Bulgarian women’s strong involvement in the economy can be seen in the fact that almost all employed women work full-time – the highest percentage among employed women in the EU. Before the communist era, Bulgaria (like other Eastern European countries) was a largely rural agricultural society, with women being integrated in the rural agricultural work. As such, they occupied a relatively high status in society (although not equal to men). Under the communist regime, the country was industrialized and “modernized”, and people came from rural areas to urban areas. The communist new ideology and economy integrated women in paid employment – in the late 1970s, Bulgaria had the highest percentage of working women in the world.