SEOUL, July 30 (AJP) - Kazakhstan's female workforce grew again in the first quarter of 2026, extending the reach of one of the world's higher rates of working women, a distinction the Central Asian country owes less to recent policy than to a century of history.
The number of employed women reached 4.527 million in the first three months of the year, up 42,600 or 0.9 percent from a year earlier, according to Kazakhstan's National Statistics Bureau under the Agency for Strategic Planning and Reforms. Of them, 79.6 percent worked as employees while 20.4 percent, or 925,100 women, were self-employed.
The scale of female participation sets Kazakhstan apart from far wealthier economies. World Bank data put the country's female labor force participation rate at about 66 percent in 2024, well above the world average of 51 percent, and ahead of both South Korea at 56 percent and the United States, where the Bureau of Labor Statistics measured the rate at 57.5 percent in early 2025.
The explanation begins in the Soviet era. For seven decades, state policy pushed women into employment, education, and professional training across Soviet Central Asia, backed by universal childcare and a social expectation that women worked. When Kazakhstan became independent in 1991, the norm survived the state that built it. Researchers point to that inheritance as the main reason post-Soviet countries cluster far above nations of comparable income on female employment.
Education has sustained the pattern. Women make up the majority of university students in Kazakhstan, and the state has kept investing in female education since independence, including scholarships that sent thousands of women to universities abroad.
Economic necessity did its own quiet work. The turbulence of the post-Soviet transition made single-income households unaffordable for most families, and two earners have remained the default ever since.
Government policy came later. Kazakhstan adopted its Concept of Family and Gender Policy in 2016 and, after joining two UN Generation Equality coalitions in 2021, abolished a Soviet-era list of professions legally closed to women, opening jobs in mining, transport, and heavy industry.
The first-quarter data suggests women are moving into those newly opened sectors. The fastest annual growth in female employment came in real estate, up 25.7 percent, followed by administrative and support services at 21.9 percent, transportation and warehousing at 16.2 percent, and industry at 7.6 percent. Some 388,100 women now work in industry.
Most working women, however, remain concentrated where they long have been. Education is the largest employer of women with 902,200 workers, or 19.9 percent of the total, followed by wholesale and retail trade with 877,600 and healthcare and social work with 426,300. Together, the three sectors account for nearly half of all employed women in the country.
That concentration feeds the number that complicates Kazakhstan's success story. Women earned an average of 344,496 tenge, about $686, in the first quarter of 2025, against 468,914 tenge, about $934, for men, a gap of roughly 26.5 percent, according to the statistics bureau. The gap had narrowed from 32.2 percent in 2013 to 21.7 percent in 2021, then widened again to 25.7 percent by 2023.
By international standards, the disparity is wide. The OECD, which compares median earnings of full-time workers, put its members' average gap at 11.3 percent, with the United States around 16 percent and Japan at 21.3 percent. South Korea recorded the widest gap in the group at 29.3 percent in 2023, a position it has held for decades, leaving Kazakhstan narrower than Korea but roughly double the OECD norm.
The Asian Development Bank concluded in its country gender assessment that while Kazakhstan's participation rate compares well internationally, the gaps between men and women in both participation and wages are not narrowing. Women also carry more unpaid domestic work than men on top of their jobs, the bank found.
The government has answered with targets. Its updated Concept of Family and Gender Policy through 2030 commits to raising the share of women at decision-making levels in state bodies, the judiciary, and the corporate sector to 30 percent by 2030, alongside measures on the wage gap and women's asset ownership. A national action plan for 2024 to 2027 folds gender equality into budgeting and labor law, and the UN Development Programme launched a campaign in Kazakhstan in 2023 pressing companies toward pay transparency.
Copyright ⓒ Aju Press All rights reserved.
