WOMEN OF KAZAKHSTAN IN THE STATE GOVERNING BODIES: INSTITUTIONAL CONDITIONS AND CAREER STRATEGIES

Abstract

The institutional conditions and career opportunities of the women in Kazakhstan in the government agencies are considered in this article. The strategies, the programs and legislative conditions for Kazakhstan women in the politics are described. Based on the analysis of fifteen semi-structured interviews of young women with experience in the public service, the main problems in the context of their professional activity are identified. Scenarios of women’s choice of public service are determined. Besides, analyzed are their ideas about the specifics of work in public authorities, mechanisms for the formation of their career strategies. In the process of the study the authors identified four scenarios of women joining the Kazakh civil service: ―result-oriented‖, ―circumstancial‖, ―family‖ and ―long range‖. The first: a woman purposefully chooses the public service as a sphere with certain advantages. The second scenario includes a random factor. The third scenario is connected with the family tradition of working in the public service. The fourth is due to the presence of ideas about the prestige of this work. These scenarios are not always implemented in a pure form, sometimes they intersect in the biography of one person. The authors describe four explanatory models of the low representation of women in Kazakhstan’s state authorities: patriarchal, stereotyped, essentialist, and mental. In the context of this, the differential features of each of the above models are characterized.