SERBIA: Women in the Workplace

Last week we published our Serbia Country Guide, created in collaboration with the Belgrade Centre for Human Rights, with the support from the Norwegian Embassy in Belgrade. Over the next few weeks we’ll be highlighting some of the unique business impacts in Serbia highlighted by the Country Guide.

We are highlighting some of the problems faced by working women in Serbia on the eve of International Women’s Day, originally called International Working Women’s Day, which is marked on 8 March.

Although the Constitution and laws guarantee equality between women and men and discrimination on grounds of gender is prohibited, as are violence, exploitation, expression of hatred and other wrongful conduct, women’s rights in Serbia are still far from satisfactory. Most people in Serbia consider women to be the most discriminated social group according to a survey conducted in November 2013 by CeSID, in which one third of the respondents emphasisedwork and labour-related discrimination.

FREN’s survey presented in 2013 showed that women entering the labour market faced high barriers and needed to be better qualified than men to access employment. Even though working women in Serbia generally have higher qualifications than men, a woman with the same labour characteristics as a man earns 11% less, or differently put, a woman works for 40 days every year without pay. The wage gap is present both in the public and private sectors, but it is the most prominent at the top of the wage ladder in the private sector, where the difference is 14 percent, and indicates a presence of a glass ceiling.

Discrimination against women in the labour market features particularly prominently with respect to the dismissal of pregnant women, women on maternity leave and mothers of young children. According to the Office of the Commissioner for Protection of Equality it is not rare that women were assigned to lower-paying jobs upon return from maternity leave. According to official statistics.

Living with children under 16 years of age increases the differences between the employment rates of men and women: in the age category of 25 to 49 years, the difference between the employment rates of women and men is only 6 percentage points if they have no children, while among persons with more than one child, the difference increases to about 25 percentage points

According to the Commissioner for Equality, women in rural areas and Roma women face additional workplace discrimination. Data collected by the Statistical Office shows that 28 percent of all farms are registered as women-owned; however, women, make up only 23 percent of all independent farmers and 71 percent of unpaid contributing family workers in agriculture.

Here is an excerpt from the Serbia Country Guide:

Among working-age Roma women, the employment rate was 9 percent, compared to 43 percent for non-Roma women; Roma women earned less than one-third of the earnings of non-Roma woman. Out of 139 Roma women surveyed by Praxis, only two were formally employed – both as cleaning staff.

International Women’s Day is also an opportunity to be reminded that women in Serbia are often victims of harassment at work. A 2011 survey by the Confederation of Autonomous Trade Unions of Serbia in 12 Serbian cities showed that one-third of female workers had been harassed at work.