|
MongoliaEducation and Employment
The major change in the position of Mongolian women is their
nearly universal participation in all levels of the educational
system and in the paid work force. In 1985 women made up 63
percent of the students in higher educational establishments and
58 percent of the students in specialized secondary schools. In
the same year, they constituted 51 percent of all workers, up
from nearly 46 percent in the 1979 census. By 1979 medicine and
teaching were predominately female fields; women were 65 percent
of all doctors and 63 percent of those working in education, art,
and culture. Women made up 67 percent of the teachers in general
schools and 33 percent of the teachers in higher educational
establishments. They constituted nearly 47 percent of
agricultural workers and 46 percent of those in industry. Women's
high level of enrollment in higher education reflected the female
predominance in medicine, nursing, teaching, and professional
child care. This echoed the pattern in the Soviet Union, where
most physicians were women and where the social and the economic
status of physicians was lower than it was in the United States
or Western Europe.
The most highly skilled Mongolian scientists, engineers,
military officers, and administrators had been trained in the
Soviet Union. In 1989 no figures were available on the percentage
of women among these elite professionals. Mongolian accounts of
working women indicated that some women worked in such jobs as
airline pilot, judge, and sculptor, and that women predominated
in the less highly paid food processing, textile, and catering
trades.
Mongolian women had legal equality, but once in the labor
force they suffered the familiar double burden of housework and
child care on top of a day's work for wages. This problem was
recognized, and a series of studies begun by the Mongolian
Academy of Sciences in 1978 found that the greatest source of
strain on urban women was excessive hours spent in transit to and
from work and shopping. There were too few buses or routes;
retail and service outlets were not only scarce, but they were
located too far from many residential areas and kept inconvenient
hours. The proposed solutions, all indirect, included state
provision of more buses; the opening of more service outlets,
including food shops, restaurants, and carryouts; public
laundries and dressmakers; and the expansion of nurseries,
kindergartens, and extended-day elementary schools. The issues of
female overrepresentation in the lower paying occupations and of
the representation of women in the higher professional and
administrative ranks in more than token numbers were not
addressed
(see Party Congress
, ch. 4).
Data as of June 1989
|
