Why deputies want to destroy the list of professions prohibited for women

Driller, aircraft mechanic and 98 more occupations not for ladies

Three years have not passed since the last time the list of professions prohibited for women was reduced – and now it is again proposed to be revised. And much more radically than before: the deputies propose to completely remove the concept of a “forbidden profession” in relation to ladies. Destroy the concept of work inaccessible to ladies as a class, so to speak.

And well maybe? The 21st century is in the yard, gentlemen-comrades. It is inappropriate for a woman to forbid anything now, she will come anyway and take it herself. Women ministers of defense are no longer news, sea wolves in skirts are also of little surprise. On earth, in heaven and at sea, ladies confidently take the helm in their hands. Live as you like, and not dress up as a cavalry girl, like Nadezhda Durova, or a tanker man, like Alexander Rashchupkin. A woman can also lay a high-voltage cable along the seabed – it is to this example of a “heavy diver”, in the world of a fragile woman, Nina Sokolova, that the authors of the bill appeal. Sokolova really was a legend of the besieged Leningrad and the heroine of the Road of Life during the Second World War.

“The list of prohibited professions directly discriminates against both women and men,” the deputies, the initiators of the project, believe, vainly mentioning social justice, which is still breaking against the “glass ceiling”. They are opposed in this discourse in absentia by those who cherish their crystal dream: a woman should be barefoot, with simple hair and pregnant. Yes, and many not so conservative fellow citizens ask: what the hell do women need, what other rights do you have? Everything is already there, all rights reserved. And the rest is from the evil one …

Wandering down the slippery path between men’s and women’s movements today, as never before, it’s easy to get lost. But in this case, the list of 100 professions “forbidden” to women from the Labor Code of the Russian Federation itself can act as a guiding star. I can’t quote it here in its entirety, which is a pity.

Because, according to the current Labor Code, women are prohibited from working in chemical production with mercury and yellow phosphorus, arsenic, lead or bismuth. Or with acids in large volumes – with sulfuric acid, for example. Underground and mining work is also prohibited: by a driller, a miner and a peat worker … Something is impossible for the weaker sex in the field of ferrous and non-ferrous metallurgy. A melter, for example, go for hot casting. Or drilling of wells is “not shown” … Well, there is more, little things. Not to be, for example, a lady in any situation as a plumber, busy cleaning sewer trenches and wells. Do not carry out knee-deep work “in this same one” in slurry tanks and cisterns, silos and haylage towers. The corpses of animals, confiscated goods and pathological materials must not be loaded, stored…

It seems that the list itself, if read, can act as a litmus test for assessing a person’s social health. If, after acquaintance, someone continues to be indignant: “So what, all the same, women can do everything and nothing can be forbidden!” is one diagnosis. If they read it and shout: “Why can’t women, but men can do all this ?!” – a different history, with a deficiency of masculinity and testosterone deficiency.

But the deputies of the State Duma are the color of the nation, our people’s representatives, and they do not lack foresight. Anticipating that in these difficult times, women may need to take jobs that were previously only allowed to work for men, now knocked out of the work process by mobilization, they propose to exclude uncomfortable articles of labor legislation. Did someone promise that it would be easy, huh? ..

I recall Naum Korzhavin’s famous paraphrase of Nekrasov’s “embossed in bronze” lines about Russian women. “She would like to live differently, to wear a precious outfit. But the horses are all galloping and galloping, and the huts are burning and burning …

Published in the newspaper “Moskovsky Komsomolets” No. 28928 dated December 8, 2022

Newspaper headline:
Horses and divers