Participants of the Women’s March rally for gender equality in Kyiv on March 8, 2020. Most women of working age are unemployed in Ukraine and, on average, get smaller salaries than men by 21.9 percent. Experts say that Ukrainians should have more protections against such workplace discrimination.

Natalia Veselovska knows her way around auto parts, but that wasn’t enough to land her a job as a procurement manager at a shipping company in Ukraine. She would have to be a man to get it.

Veselovska, a displaced 44-year-old single mother from war-torn Donetsk, applied for the job on the state employment service’s referral in Berdyansk, a port city 760 kilometers southeast of Kyiv. The company’s secretary took her employment form to the director and returned with a “no” answer. 

“The job requires buying auto parts, and a man should do it. You’re a woman – you don’t match,” the secretary said, quoting the male director, according to Veselovska.

Like Veselovksa, most women of working age have no job in Ukraine. Only 49% of women are officially employed. By comparison, 65% of men have official employment, according to the State Statistics Service’s 2019 data. On average, Ukrainian women get 22% smaller salaries than men.

Sexism-motivated workplace inequality is very typical for Ukraine, says Vitaliy Dudin, a lawyer with Social Rukh, a nonprofit that defends workers. Meanwhile, the current labor code only mentions that workplace discrimination and groundless job refusals are prohibited. It provides limited tools to protect Ukrainians from workplace discrimination, and the changes lawmakers have recently proposed to the code could make things even worse, he says.

“(These regulations) don’t impose any severe sanctions,” Dudin says. “And their application requires considerable effort from the employee in every case.”

Lawmakers submitted the proposed legislation as bills 2681 and 2708 in December, promising they would alter the labor code, which has been around for almost 50 years. However, with President Volodymyr Zelensky’s dismissal of Prime Minister Oleksiy Honcharuk’s Cabinet in March, the bill was procedurally withdrawn. But the bills’ main authors believe that the changes proposed will be included in the new draft legislation.

Meanwhile, Veselovska has only one way to defend her rights: go to court. She would have to pay a court fee and provide factual evidence of discrimination. The employer’s written refusal won’t work, because it will most likely say that she was not hired for not fitting the official job requirements.

Veselovska could find a witness: the secretary, if she’s willing to testify against her boss, for example. Or she could submit a written demand to the employer for statistics to prove whether women mostly receive refusals when applying for this job.

But she’s reluctant to go these lengths to get the job or financial compensation.

“For me, this (legal) mechanism doesn’t work,” she says.

Sexism

Ukraine ranked 84th in the Women’s Workplace Equality Index out of 189 countries in 2018, lower than most Eastern European states like Romania, Slovakia and Moldova. According to the Council on Foreign Relations, a U.S. think tank, Ukraine scored lowest in four categories: building credit, protecting women from violence, getting a job and ease of going to court.

Perceptions of gender inequality paint a slightly different picture: only 23 percent of Ukrainians think that men and women are not treated equally in the workplace. But 75 percent of these people think that men are treated better, according to the 2018 survey by the National Democratic Institute. 

According to the same survey, 13% of Ukrainians know someone who has been a victim of sexual harassment. 76% of these said that the victim was a woman.

Women with baby strollers walk in Kyiv on the afternoon of Tuesday, March 3, 2020. Discrimination due to pregnancy or parental status are not uncommon in Ukrainian workplaces. According to surveys, 40 percent of Ukrainians have experienced discrimination. (Kostyantyn Chernichkin)

Ways to improve

But gender inequality is just one of the many reasons that people face discrimination at work: age and disability, marital and parental statuses, race, language and ethnicity are other common ones. According to a 2017 survey by the Democratic Initiatives Fund, 40% of Ukrainians have experienced discrimination.

Filing lawsuits against the employer is the most direct way to fight workplace discrimination, but the burden of proof in such cases should be on the accused, Dudin says.

This means that Veselovska would only have to report or sue the employer for discrimination, and he would have to provide evidence to the contrary. Ideally, she would not have to pay a court fee if her case stands.

Unlike the current labor code, the new draft law proposed by the former government does put the burden of proof on the employer. Dudin welcomes this change, but says that it’s not enough: The court fee should also be canceled and the employee should be able to be represented by any legal professional or NGO activist.

Another new thing that lawmakers want to introduce is the prohibition of mobbing — pressure by a group — and some other forms of workplace harassment, which are generally considered types of discrimination. But neither the current labor code nor the draft changes mention sexual harassment, leaving it up to the law on the equal rights of women and men to prohibit this offense.

“The draft law on labor should not only include notions of mobbing and sexual harassment but also require employers to adopt anti-discrimination and sexual harassment prevention policies,” says Hrystyna Kit, a lawyer and head of the JurFem association of Ukrainian female lawyers.

For example, job applications in some countries of the European Union exclude information on the candidates’ gender, so the hiring commission chooses only based upon job requirements and the person’s work experience.

Dudin agrees that the employer should be required by law to create a safe and healthy work environment that excludes discrimination, disrespect, hostility and harassment.

“This would mean that, even if the employer did not commit any negative acts, and the employee suffers from other staff, the employer would still be responsible for not performing his duties,” Dudin says. “The draft law lacks such a comprehensive understanding of these issues.”

Encouraging the employer to ensure a safe working environment requires severe sanctions for any violations, Dudin says. The current labor code and the draft law specify fines for only four violations against employees, like concealing employment or not paying on time.

These fines range from three to ten times the minimum wage – from Hr 14,000 to Hr 47,000 ($500 to $1,690). The fine for all other violations is one minimum wage of Hr 4,730 ($170) – a very forgiving penalty, Dudin says. 

“This means that, even when a pregnant woman is involved in night work or someone molests a woman, the employer will only pay one minimal wage,” Dudin says.

Experts have most actively criticized the proposed labor law for trying to simplify the ways in which an employer can fire employees. Unlike under the current labor code, the employer would be able to fire anyone — except employees who are pregnant or on parental leave — without reason by giving advanced warning and paying compensation. 

This simplified firing procedure will allow hidden discrimination to flourish, Dudin says. The employer would be able to fire someone for any reason – gender, age, sexual orientation, language, disability – and just pay compensation.

Galina Tretyakova, the main author of the draft law and the head of the parliamentary committee on social policy, says that the changes are intended to create equal rules on the labor market, achieve a balance of interests between employees and employers and simplify the entry and exit procedures in labor relations, while enhancing economic protection mechanisms against sudden job loss.

Dudin says that to prevent discrimination, labor law should favor the employee, who is the weaker party, and put the state and the unions on his or her side.

“Anti-discriminatory activity by the state and labor unions is a way to build respect for the employee. And then this respect itself will serve as a deterrent for inhumane behavior.”