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This paper develops the concept of the family cage as a central analytical framework for understanding how family-based norms structure employment decisions and organisational inequality in Kazakhstan. Labour markets are formally governed by meritocratic criteria such as skills and experience, but our study shows that professional evaluations are systematically mediated by workers’ family status, anticipated family trajectories, and conformity to gendered family roles.

The family cage refers to a socio-cultural mechanism through which family status is used as an institutionalised principle of workplace evaluation. Both women and men are assessed through marital status, parental responsibilities, and moral expectations attached to normative family roles. For men, marriage functions as a marker of stability and responsibility, unmarried men are viewed as unreliable. For women, even unmarried, employability is shaped by assumptions of inevitable motherhood and extensive caregiving obligations.

The paper asks how the family cage becomes embedded in organisational practices and how it produces gender-differentiated labour market outcomes. The analysis shifts attention from individual discrimination to organisational mechanisms through which family-based norms become legitimate criteria in hiring, promotion, and job allocation.

Theoretically, the study draws on feminist theories of gendered organisations and social reproduction, integrating insights from the literature on familialism, the ideal worker norm, the maternal wall, and flexibility stigma. A post-socialist feminist perspective situates the family cage within a context where neoliberal meritocratic discourse coexists with strong kin-based moral economies.

Empirically, the paper employs a mixed-methods design combining qualitative interviews with HR managers across multiple sectors and an original quantitative survey (N = 320). Interviews reveal that family status is routinely treated as a valid basis for employment decisions, with hiring processes involving questions about marital status, children, reproductive plans, and spousal approval. Survey data show that women—especially those with young children—face systematic exclusion, while men’s family status, particularly marriage, often enhances perceived reliability.

The paper argues that the family cage operates as a gendered sorting mechanism that naturalises inequality by framing discriminatory practices as culturally appropriate and morally justified.

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This paper examines the representation of gender in the archaeological discourse on the Botai Eneolithic culture in northern Kazakhstan and the impact of these representations on the wider narrative on the Eurasian steppe. While the Botai culture is frequently cited as a key case in discussions of horse domestication and Eneolithic social complexity in the region, analyses of its social dynamics frequently rely on interpretive frameworks that embed assumptions about gender, power, and agency.

In this study, the representation of gender in the discourse on the Botai culture will be explored using qualitative research methods on sixteen open-access publications in Russian and English. This research identifies recurring patterns in how scholars distribute agency, authority, and symbolic meaning in reconstructions of the Botai past. The analysis shows that men are more often described as central historical actors, such as leaders, innovators, and ritual specialists, while women are more frequently associated with domestic activity, fertility symbolism, or supportive roles. In several texts, gender itself is treated as an obvious or secondary category, even in contexts where labor organization, ritual practice, and social structure are central to interpretation. These representations are not derived from the archaeological evidence itself. Instead, they reflect interpretive framework and long-standing disciplinary approach that shape how material remains are translated into social narratives. By situating Botai literature within broader debates in gender-aware archaeology, the paper demonstrates how traditional narrative bias, such as active men and passive women, become normalized and reproduced, even when the material record is ambiguous.

The paper also examines how institutional and disciplinary conventions shape interpretive results, including patterns of citation, the marginal presence of gender-focused scholarship, and the tendency to treat gender as self-evident rather than as a subject of examination.

The research advocates for more reflexive approaches to gender in steppe archaeology. Making underlying assumptions explicit and testing alternative interpretations can produce richer and more accurate understandings of social life in Eneolithic Central Eurasia. Re-examining Botai archaeology through this lens not only complicates established narratives of early pastoral societies but also highlights how interpretations of the past continue to reflect the intellectual traditions of the present.

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Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, outward migration has become structurally

embedded in Central Asian societies. Existing scholarship has largely interpreted these

movements through remittance economies and labor market differentials, while paying

comparatively limited attention to the symbolic and relational conditions that render migration

economically viable. In particular, the role of historically grounded narratives of cultural

affinity and gendered constructions of care in shaping processes of economic incorporation

remains underexamined.

This paper conceptualizes migration among Central Asian women to Türkiye as a strategic and

relational process of capital conversion. Shared linguistic, religious, and historical ties,

amplified through post-1991 discourses of Turkic affinity, intersect with the gendered

organization of domestic and care work to constitute a distinct field of opportunity and

constraint. Within intimate household labor settings, perceived cultural proximity mitigates

social distance and facilitates trust-based employment relations. At the same time, care work

is structured around the naturalization of women’s emotional labor, which is treated as inherent

rather than socially produced and cultivated.

Drawing on qualitative fieldwork, the paper demonstrates that migrant women are neither

passive recipients of these narratives nor merely positioned by gendered expectations. Through

experience, peer exchange, and ongoing relational negotiation, they develop practical

repertoires for mobilizing culturally legible forms of familiarity while regulating the scope and

intensity of emotional engagement. Boundary-setting, recalibration of affective investment,

and selective withdrawal emerge as learned practices. Capital conversion, understood as the

transformation of cultural, social, and emotional resources into economic stability, therefore

unfolds as a temporally evolving and dialectical process in which women participate in both

the reproduction and subtle transformation of gendered labor regimes.

By foregrounding agency within historically constituted and relationally enacted structures,

this paper contributes to scholarship on migration as social strategy, affective labor, and the

reconfiguration of mobility systems in Central Eurasia.

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This paper examines how gendered constructions of work–life balance function as structural and symbolic mechanisms of power limiting women’s advancement to executive leadership in Kazakhstan’s rapidly digitalizing IT sector. While global debates on women in STEM frequently emphasize individual ambition or skills deficits, this study situates leadership attrition within post-Soviet institutional legacies, organizational cultures, and enduring cultural norms surrounding motherhood and caregiving. Drawing on Hochschild and Machung’s (1989) concept of the “second shift,” Acker’s (1990) theory of gendered organizations and the “ideal worker,” Williams’s (2001) maternal wall framework, and Hays’s (1998) notion of intensive motherhood, the paper analyzes how gendered expectations are reproduced within contemporary digital workplaces.

The research employs a sequential mixed-methods design. Quantitative workforce data were collected from 32 IT companies in Kazakhstan to assess gender distribution across entry, mid-level, and executive positions. These data are complemented by 13 in-depth interviews and focus group discussions with mid- and senior-level women managers. Descriptive statistical analysis and thematic coding were used to identify structural patterns and lived experiences of career progression.

Findings reveal a pronounced leadership drop-off: although women constitute approximately 43% of the workforce and reach mid-level management at near parity with men, their representation at C-level declines sharply, with only 1.4% advancing from entry-level to executive roles. Promotion probabilities decrease in larger firms. Qualitative evidence shows that caregiving responsibilities operate as a central career filter. The “ideal worker” norm (Acker, 1990), characterized by constant availability and temporal flexibility, conflicts with culturally embedded expectations of intensive motherhood (Hays, 1998), generating moral dilemmas between family and career. Formal flexibility policies often carry stigma, reinforcing maternal wall dynamics (Williams, 2001).

By integrating feminist organizational theory with post-Soviet institutional analysis, the paper argues that leadership exclusion reflects not individual choice but the interaction of gendered cultural norms, care infrastructures, and organizational power structures. In doing so, it rethinks Central Eurasian digital transformation as a site where economic modernization coexists with deeply embedded gendered inequalities.

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Visual analysis of gender portrayal in school textbooks are often limited in corpus and subject areas. Most studies rely on a small number of textbooks, which restricts them in capturing broader patterns. At the same time, the scholarship frequently focuses on history or language textbooks, overlooking other subject areas. In this study, I address these limitations by analyzing a substantially larger corpus of textbooks across all school subjects.

This work analyzes visual gender representation in Uzbekistan’s school textbooks through a combination of quantitative and semiotic image analysis. The corpus comprises 82 textbooks for lower secondary-general education (Grades 5 to 9) approved by the Ministry of Public Education of the Republic of Uzbekistan for 2020-2021 academic year. The preliminary findings are consistent with the results of similar studies conducted in other national contexts and point to three main patterns: 1) There is a significant gap in the numerical representation of women and men, favoring men; 2) Occupational representation in textbook images strongly reinforces gendered social roles – women are often depicted in caregiving roles while men are portrayed in authoritative positions; 3) Although there is not significant variation across subject areas, languages textbooks, especially those developed with the help of European actors/donors, demonstrate a more balanced representation and fewer gender stereotypes. As one of the first studies to conduct a systematic visual analysis of school textbooks in the Central Asian context, this research contributes to broader comparative discussions by offering cross-subject and cross-grade insights into gender representation.

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This paper examines the historical foundations of gender relations within the Hazara community of Afghanistan. It challenges the widespread assumption that Hazara women’s relative freedoms emerged primarily from international intervention between 2001 and 2021. While many discussions of Afghan gender politics portray gender inequality as a long-standing and uniform feature of Afghan society, this study argues that comparatively egalitarian gender norms have deeper historical roots within Hazara society.

The paper draws on nineteenth-century historical accounts, particularly the writings of Josiah Harlan, as well as on reports and observations by British colonial officials and travelers in Afghanistan. These sources provide early descriptions of Hazara social life and offer insights into the roles and status of women within Hazara communities. Through close reading of these historical materials, the paper shows that Hazara women historically participated in social and economic life to a degree that differed from many contemporary descriptions of gender relations elsewhere in Afghanistan. The evidence suggests that Hazara women often enjoyed relatively greater mobility, visibility in public life, and participation in household and community decision-making.

The paper argues that these historical patterns point to a longer tradition of comparatively egalitarian gender practices within Hazara society. By situating Hazara gender relations within a broader historical context, the study contributes to scholarship on gender, ethnicity, and social diversity in Afghanistan and Central Eurasia. More broadly, it challenges homogenizing narratives about Afghan society and highlights the importance of regional and ethnic variation in shaping gender norms and social institutions.

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Soviet reproductive politics in Central Asia were a complex site where ethno-racial hierarchies and imperial biopolitics were weaved into shaping the “Soviet society.” This research shifts focus to the historical roots of educated mother figure and how it was constructed through colonial driven reproductive governance. In Uzbekistan, the 1927 unveiling campaign Hujum (meaning attack) aimed at women’s “emancipation”, dismantling Islamic gender norms while promoting a new socialist maternal ideal. The Soviet ideology constructed the “educated mother” through literacy campaigns, “mother heroine” awards for mothers with 10 children and more, maternity leaves, and women’s labour force integration (Kandiyoti, 2007; Northrop, 2004). While such policies led to social transformation, they also imposed Soviet modernity as a colonial civilizing mission (Tlostanova, 2010). However, such governance extended beyond policy into visual and scientific regimes. Soviet propaganda posters idealized motherhood as patriotic labour, linking maternal health, infant care, and hygiene to socialist success. Simultaneously, Soviet anthropologists such as Iasevich and Oshanin carried out state-funded projects photographing and measuring naked Uzbek women to define racialized “body types” and construct a normative female Uzbek subject (Northrop, 2004). The concept of the Soviet "educated mother" in Uzbekistan resonates with global maternalist ideologies from US Republican Motherhood's civic reproduction (Kerber, 1980) to imperial hygiene campaigns sustaining empire (Yuval-Davis, 1994), but with a particular colonialized Central Asian bodies. After unveiling campaign, women in Uzbekistan were symbolically exalted into education, yet materially burdened and expected to give birth to the socialist future, while also contributing to Soviet economic development through compulsory agricultural labour (cotton picking) and factory work. Though the literacy campaigns profoundly expanded women’s education levels, it also functioned as tools for ideological re-socialization. The aim of this paper is to interrogate how reproductive governance in Soviet Uzbekistan operated through the figure of the “educated mother” as a site of both biopolitical control and potential agency. It asks: How were childbirth, contraception, and family-making regulated to shape a Soviet society? Using a postcolonial feminist historiographical lens, the study draws on Soviet-era policy documents, propaganda art, anthropological studies, and oral histories. It critically engages with interdisciplinary scholarship on gender, race, and modernization in Soviet and post-Soviet Central Asia (Sultanalieva, 2023). This study contributes to understanding Soviet reproductive governance as a tool of imperial control and highlights the need for pluriversal and intersectional approaches to feminist history in Central Asia that position the voices and bodies historically rendered invisible.

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This article examines Inner Me (2024), an installation-performance by contemporary Mongolic artist Bayanchuleet, as an embodied articulation of Mongolic shamanic animism within conditions of rapid social and cultural transformation. Across the steppe, Mongolic cosmology has long understood human life as inseparable from sky, earth, and ancestral presence, conceiving the world as composed of multiple coexisting realms in continuous interaction. While such relational assumptions persist within Mongolic ways of knowing, dominant narratives in contemporary China privilege linear models of development, progress, and artistic value. Inner Me confronts this tension through an immersive installation and live dance performance that stages the lived fragmentation experienced by young Mongols navigating between nomadic memory and urban modernity.

The installation is organized around the suspended roof ring (toono) of a Mongolic yurt, from which wires, mirrors, and fabric extend outward to form a dense spatial environment. Entering this structure with a shamanic drum, Bayanchuleet moves through the installation with gestures that oscillate between ritual rhythm and visible physical strain. His choreography transforms the installation from a symbolic setting into a relational field shaped by material forces, ancestral traces, and environmental conditions. Situating Inner Me as the culmination of the earlier works Unseen Tenger and Looking for New Totem, this article argues that the exhibition renders Mongolic shamanic animism perceptible as an embodied, spiral-temporal mode of relating in which ancestral presence remains palpable but no longer guarantees stable orientation.

The essay brings the work into conversation with Western feminist and Indigenous theorists including Leslie Marmon Silko, Donna Haraway, M. Jacqui Alexander, and Nathan Snaza, using their concepts as interpretive bridges that make the work more legible to Western readers rather than as frameworks that explain or subsume Mongolic artistic and cosmological practices. Through choreography, spatial composition, and embodied negotiation, Inner Me reveals a shamanic way of worlding that persists within contemporary conditions of fragmentation.

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This paper examines the value-motivational sphere and psychological well-being of mothers raising children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in Kazakhstan, situating their experiences within broader debates on gender, care, and social support in Central Eurasia. While autism is frequently addressed through medical and educational frameworks, this study argues that the everyday realities of mothers of children with ASD cannot be understood without attention to culturally specific expectations of motherhood, gendered care obligations, and the limited availability of institutional support. In the Kazakhstani context, maternal resilience emerges not simply as an individual psychological trait, but as a socially structured response to uncertainty, stigma, and unequal distributions of emotional and practical labor.

The paper draws on empirical data collected from mothers raising children with ASD in Kazakhstan, including survey-based materials on resilience, social support, and related psychological predictors, as well as a contextual analysis of cultural norms surrounding family responsibility, caregiving, and women’s roles. Methodologically, the study combines psychological analysis with a broader socio-cultural interpretation in order to connect individual experiences to regional patterns of social organization.

The paper argues that the emotional and motivational experiences of these mothers are shaped by an interaction between personal coping resources and external cultural pressures. Preliminary findings indicate that social support functions as a key predictor of resilience, while intolerance of uncertainty, persistent caregiving burden, and normative expectations of self-sacrificing motherhood intensify emotional strain. At the same time, cultural and spiritual values may serve both as sources of meaning and as mechanisms that reinforce gendered responsibility for care.

By focusing on Kazakhstan, this paper contributes to Central Eurasian studies by bringing disability, care, and maternal experience into conversations that have more often centered on nationalism, state-building, or geopolitics. It also contributes to interdisciplinary scholarship on gender and care by showing how autism-related caregiving in Central Eurasia is mediated by local moral worlds, family norms, and uneven support infrastructures.

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This paper examines the lived, everyday experiences of women fashion entrepreneurs in Uzbekistan, addressing the question of how they build and navigate their businesses in a context where there are gendered expectations for women. Drawing on ten in-depth qualitative interviews and digital ethnography of Instagram performances, the paper explores how entrepreneurial practices are embedded within social relations and culturally specific gender expectations.

The findings show that women entrepreneurs encounter different formal and informal constraints, including unpredictable taxes and regulations, as well as gendered expectations in family and institutional settings. Considering Deniz Kandiyoti’s concept of patriarchal bargaining, the paper argues that entrepreneurial agency is not expressed through resistance but through strategic negotiation within patriarchal structures. Furthermore, it shows that entrepreneurship in Uzbekistan is relationally embedded, with social ties simultaneously functioning as constraints and enabling resources.

This paper contributes to debates on gender and women entrepreneurship in three different ways. First, it extends the concept of patriarchal bargaining beyond the household, showing how it operates as an entrepreneurial strategy through which women navigate formal and informal constraints and opportunities. Second, it shows that an entrepreneurial agency in Uzbekistan is not always individualistic, but it is about social relations and embeddedness within them. Thirdly, it offers a contextualized understanding of entrepreneurship in Central Asia, where different institutional dynamics co-produce entrepreneurial practices.

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This paper addresses the following research question: why do structural barriers persist in limiting women's meaningful political participation in Uzbekistan despite formal legal reforms and increased numerical representation? Drawing on a mixed-methods design, the study combines qualitative and quantitative data collected from three sources: focus group discussions with 54 women deputies across five regional centers (Tashkent, Fergana, Samarkand, Karshi, and Nukus); semi-structured interviews with 32 participants of political leadership training programs; and an online survey of 29 female parliamentarians at national and local levels. These primary data are triangulated against international legal frameworks and secondary literature to situate Uzbekistan within broader comparative trends.

The paper finds that barriers operate across three interconnected domains. Socio-culturally, entrenched gender stereotypes and family resistance delay women's entry into politics, with many entering only after the age of 40–45, once domestic obligations ease. Socio-economically, the unpaid nature of local deputy work, combined with transportation costs and exclusion from high-paying professional networks, disproportionately burdens women. On security, focus group and interview data document harassment, workplace retaliation, and online abuse targeting women who challenge political authority. Together, these findings demonstrate that formal legal equality alone cannot dismantle structural inequalities - an argument tested through firsthand accounts that reveal persistent gaps between policy commitments and lived political realities.

The paper contributes to comparative gender studies by challenging approaches that equate numerical representation with substantive inclusion, and by offering empirically grounded analysis of how gendered power structures function in a transitional, post-Soviet context.

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The study explores the experience of men living with their parents’ family immediately after marriage in Kyrgyzstan. Drawing on interviews with twelve Kyrgyz men, the analysis revealed five main themes: (1) parental pressure to select a suitable wife, (2) strategies for navigating tension within the extended family, (3) normalizing and justifying the wives’ position as kelins in the in-laws’ household under tradition, (4) a son’s role in maintaining relationship between parents and wife and (5) care and tradition continuity as a justification for co-residence. The themes are discussed in the framework of Family Systems Theory and postcolonial feminist authorship.

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Research on maternal discrimination in hiring has been largely concentrated in Western contexts, where the "motherhood penalty," the systematic disadvantage mothers face relative to childless women and men, is well documented. In Kazakhstan as part of the post-Soviet world, employed motherhood may carry a different cultural context and legacy, and motherhood bias may therefore also operate differently. There is a separate stream on the intersection of policy, management, and psychology that examines how agentic traits, such as competence, ambition, and independence, shape hiring evaluations. This paper applies the multidimensional model of agency provided by Ma et al. (2022) in two vignette experiments conducted in Kazakhstan, representing the first experimental investigation of maternal hiring discrimination in Central Asia.

The first experiment employed a 2×2 between-subjects design in which evaluators (N=171, alumni of graduate programs) assessed a hypothetical job candidate varying by gender (female vs. male) and parental status (parent vs. non-parent). Contrary to hypotheses derived from Western literature, mothers did not receive lower hiring recommendations than childless women. Female candidates were rated significantly higher on independence and commitment relative to male candidates. However, these favorable agentic attributions did not translate into corresponding hiring advantages, which requires further investigation.

The second experiment, using the same evaluator sample, manipulated parental leave duration across three levels (six months, one and a half years, and three years) to examine how leave length shapes hiring evaluations. Extended leave of three years significantly reduced hiring recommendations relative to shorter durations. Mediation analyses indicated that this penalty operated through diminished perceptions of competence and work priority. Male evaluators who were themselves parents imposed the most pronounced penalty for extended leave.

These findings point that in Kazakhstan, where working motherhood has long been a social norm rather than an exception, gender and parental status alone do not reliably predict hiring disadvantage. Extended duration of leave, on the other hand, works as a more consequential signal than motherhood status itself, with penalties operating through perceptions of competence and work commitment. Extending parental leave entitlements without addressing how prolonged absence is evaluated by employers may have unintended consequences and undermine the very goals such policies are designed to achieve.

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This paper will present an ongoing interdisciplinary research studying patriarchal social institutions and gender asymmetry in Central Asia primarily through feminist approach to social sciences. Based on social media analysis, political ethnography and semi-structured interviews with local and international experts, the paper answers the question why Central Asian region is experiencing increasing re-traditionalization of societies and revival of patriarchy manifest in the form of increased number of cases of domestic violence and violence against women. The research is built on and continues the previous project on multiple crises in the region, the author aims to place the “crisis of patriarchy” into the “vicious cycle” of “traditional and non-traditional” security threats that, according to Niklas Swanström (2010), the weakening states of Central Asia are facing. Gender roles and gender asymmetry play important roles not only in discussion of their relation to sustainable economic development and women empowerment in political representation but also in nation-building processes and nationalistic rhetoric in the region.

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Femicide, the gender-based killing of women, remains largely invisible in Kazakhstan, where legislation does not recognize it as a distinct crime. Despite high rates of domestic violence and gender-based killings—estimated at 400 female victims annually—media coverage frequently fails to frame these murders as a social issue rooted in gender inequality, cultural norms, and systemic injustice. This study examines how femicide is represented in Kazakhstani news media. Funded by UN Women ECA as part of the “Women Count” project, the research combines quantitative web scraping method and qualitative discourse analysis to address the absence of official data and proper media representation.

The study builds a database of 106 femicide cases from 4,000 articles published on the leading online news portal Tengrinews.kz between 2018 and 2023. Descriptive statistics reveal that most femicides occur in enclosed urban spaces, predominantly in victims’ homes, and involve male perpetrators aged 21–40. Intimate partners account for the largest proportion of perpetrators, followed by acquaintances and family members, highlighting the relevance of domestic and familial contexts. Common methods of killing include stabbing, beating, and strangling. More than half of the female victims had children, yet protective measures were rarely documented.

Critical discourse analysis of 48 cases demonstrates consistent patterns in news coverage. Femicide is often unnamed, with reports foregrounding perpetrators while minimizing victims’ lives and agency. News articles frequently justify the murderer, dramatize the crime, and prioritize third-party perspectives, reflecting implicit biases and reinforcing cultural norms that normalize gendered violence. Victim-centered reporting, while present, remains rare.

The findings underscore the urgent need for legal recognition of femicide in Kazakhstan, systematic data collection, and responsible media practices that foreground victims and contextualize murders within broader gender inequality. The study contributes to the limited literature on Central Asian femicide, revealing regional patterns, such as multigenerational family dynamics, that shape perpetrator-victim relationships. By highlighting both quantitative trends and qualitative framing, this research informs policy interventions, media guidelines, and public awareness efforts aimed at preventing femicide and addressing systemic gender-based violence in Kazakhstan.

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Perceptions of gender discrimination are formed unevenly and depend on social and economic variables. Recent research shows that different population groups recognize and interpret manifestations of gender inequality differently. The aim of this study is to identify key socioeconomic predictors of perceived gender discrimination and analyze how these factors manifest themselves in the context of Kazakhstan. This study provides analyzed data from the Life in Transitions Survey with econometric methods, such as ordered logistic model. Our findings show that perceived gender discrimination is higher among women, the younger generation and workers in specific job sectors. These results underscore the importance of gender economics in constructing public policy. The paper also empirically supports and extends past research on this topic.

Keywords: perceived gender discrimination, men and women, Kazakhstan, employment