Paper abstract:

Despite the declared equality of rights and opportunities, some groups of Kazakhstani citizens still are more privileged than others. For example, though women comprise a half of Kazakhstani population, they have only 27% of seats in Majilis (lower chamber of Parliament). In Government, only 3 out of 19 ministries are headed by women. This share is not enough for female politicians to try to turn the tide and advocate for women’s issues. They have to build themselves in the existing paradigm with men’s prevalence and play by their rules. The same situation is with the youth. The average age of a Kazakhstani citizen is 32 years, while the average age of parliamentarians is 50.

This status quo reproduces the perception of women and young people not as a subject, but an object which needs to be influenced by the tools of information, gender and youth policies.

In such conditions, the most promising way for women and youth to participate in decision-making process is civic technologies and grassroot self-organization, however, these tools are not always available for the two groups. To define the barriers that prevent young people and women to take part in self-organization, 16 synchronous and 2 asynchronous focus groups were conducted in March 2022. In result of the study, it was revealed that there are barriers that can be attributed to all Kazakhstanis, such as information poverty and fear of being an activist, but there are also some gender and age specific barriers that don’t allow women and youth be more active and enterprising. I argue that the factors preventing women from participating in civic activities and/or self-organization are different from those for the youth. The former are held back by the conservative views of community they live in while the latter are usually coopted by government with the help of various tools which I call the “appeasement policy”.