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Missing Female Occupational Categories in the Soviet Censuses

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Michael Paul Sacks
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Extract

The 1959 and 1970 published Soviet censuses list several hundred categories of occupations. Yet far more types of employment exist than are indicated by this number of categories. The Dictionary of Occupational Titles published by the U.S. Department of Labor, for example, is composed of approximately 20,000 jobs. The sparsity of categories in any census is a product of the lengthy process in which (1) specific questions regarding employment are designed; (2) respondents interpret the questions and either answer or fail to answer them; (3) answers are coded into specific occupational categories; and (4) these categories are selected and sometimes grouped together for the purpose of the actual census publications. The selection and grouping of categories are of primary concern since here, as at earlier stages, the potential exists for deliberate or inadvertent distortions and for the compromise of the detail and precision of the census.

Type
Notes and Comment
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 40 , Issue 2 , Summer 1981 , pp. 251 - 263
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1981

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References

1. Dictionary of Occupational Titles, 4th ed. (Washington, D.C., 1977).

2. Results of the 1939 census, the most recent census conducted prior to 1959, had never been published before with the exception of some very limited figures. It was in the spring of 1956 that the first national economy handbook since the 1930s was published. These changes, of course, reflected the political change that ensued in the years following Stalin's death (see Hough, Jerry F. and Fainsod, Merle, How The Soviet Union Is Governed [Cambridge, Mass., 1979], pp. 204–13Google Scholar; and Murray Feshbach, “Soviet Industrial Labor and Productivity Statistics,” in Treml, Vladimir G. and Hardt, John P., eds. Soviet Economic Statistics [North Carolina, 1972]Google Scholar).

3. Itogi vsesoiuznoi perepisi naseleniia 1959 goda, 16 vols. (Moscow, 1962), RSFSR, tables 42,43, 47, 48 (hereafter cited as 1959 Census). 4. Itogi vsesoiuznoi perepisi naseleniia 1970 goda, 1 vols. (Moscow, 1972-73), volume 6, tables 2 33 (hereafter cited as 1970 Census).

5. Norton T. Dodge notes the following: “The occupations classed as semiprofessional and professional are distinguished chiefly by the amount and kind of educational background they require. Semiprofessional occupations are those that require specialized secondary education, although appropriate experience may suffice in some instances; professional ones are those that require higher (e.g. university level) education” (see Dodge, , “Women in the Professions,” in Women in Russia, Dorothy Atkinson, Alexander Dallin, and Gail W. Lapidus, eds. [Stanford, 1977], p. 206Google Scholar).

6. The most direct evidence regarding omitted female categories comes from a comparison of the female listing and the total listing. Many categories in the total listing are missing entirely from the female listing. In addition, single categories in the female listing are often divided into a number of subcategories in the total listing.

7. Michael Paul Sacks, Women's Work in Soviet Russia: Continuity in the Midst of Change (New York, 1976); Dodge, Norton T., Women in the Soviet Economy (Baltimore, 1966)Google Scholar; Lapidus, Gail W., Women in Soviet Society (Berkeley, 1978Google Scholar).

8. See Sacks, Women's Work in Soviet Russia.

9. 1970 Census, 4:642.

10. Of the fifty subcategories in the female listing of the 1959 census, only nineteen are below 27 percent female. Thus, nearly half of these occupations with especially low female representation are omitted from the 1970 census publication.

11. The decline by 4 or more points occurs in occupations #30, #36, #65 plus #66, and #72. The two remaining categories are #93 plus #94 and #85.

12. As discussed above, the category of economic directors is combined with chief doctors and heads of medical institutions (#38). In the 1970 census the former is dropped from the category, although there is no change in the title to indicate this.

13. Cf. Hough and|Fainsod, How The Soviet Union Is Governed, pp. 339-0.

14. 1970 Census, 4:654.

15. Sacks, Women's Work in Soviet Russia, pp. 90-91; Lapidus, Women in Soviet Society, pp. 181-94.

16. Dodge, Women in the Soviet Economy, pp. 67-74; Moses, Joel C., The Politics of Female Labor in the Soviet Union (New York, 1978), pp. 19–21 Google Scholar.

17. Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR 1973 g. (Moscow, 1973); Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR 1979 g. (Moscow, 1980).

18. Robert|Reinhold, New York Times. February 11, 1979.