Women in Ukraine are saving the war-drained job market

With men at the front, more and more women in Ukraine are replacing them in jobs traditionally considered male.Courses for miners, welders and truck drivers are increasing.

Valentina Korotaeva is 30 years old and has two children.Before war he worked as a sales assistant in a store in Pokrovsk, in the region of Donetsk besieged by Russian troops.But when a missile fell a few meters from the shop, the owner lowered the shutters.Definitely.And today Korotaeva wears her overalls and helmet every day, and goes underground in the mine of Pokrovsk, where dozens and dozens of women have been hired in the last two years.

With theRussian invasion in Ukraine, the labor market has also undergone a radical transformation:more than five million people lost their jobs under the bombs, women began to replace the men who left for the front, entering sectors that were previously exclusively male and often taking on difficult positions that they would never have dreamed of doing in the world .They have become like this miners, welders, truck drivers, warehouse workers. Valentina Korotaeva, for example, today works as a crane operator:operates the cranes that move large machinery in the belly of the Pokrovsk mine, managed by Metinvest, the largest steel producer in the country.

New training courses for women in Ukraine

So the war advances, destroying not only homes and infrastructure but also businesses.The men take up arms.Occupations considered "male" are becoming empty.And the job market, as well as companies, adapts.

According to the Ukrainian State Employment Service, in 2023 in Ukraine 240 thousand people found new jobs, and 66 percent of them were women, who were hired as machine operators, crane operators, mechanics, truck drivers, miners, repair and mechanical assembly specialists.And the list is not complete.

Furthermore, the Ukrainian State Employment Service points out that the numbers are constantly increasing women that they choose training courses to fill traditionally male roles.A trend that has been recorded especially since the second half of 2023.Last year, 25,200 women were trained, many of whom studied to become boiler operators, tram and trolleybus drivers, welding machines and woodworking machine operators.

Also the Swedish non-profit organization Reskilling Ukraine has launched training courses aimed at women who want to become truck drivers.This year more than a thousand women applied, but the funds available allowed only 350 to be trained.

Among other things, precisely to make up for the loss of manpower, the Ukrainian government has suspended the law inherited fromSoviet Union which prohibited women from carrying out particularly "heavy and dangerous" jobs.

Companies now choose women

Companies are also taking action.With the hemorrhaging of workers leaving for the front, human resources are trying to attract more female workers even in those sectors previously dominated by men, surpassing among other things prejudices hard to die.

In the mine Pokrovsk, for example, a training course was launched at the beginning of 2024 that allowed thirty-two women to work underground.

“I was surprised.It's unusual to see a woman with a shovel doing a man's work,” he told the New York Times Dmytro Tobalov, a 28-year-old miner, who explained that in his working group twelve men took up arms and were replaced by ten female miners.“They're doing a good job,” he added.

For fear of losing his male collaborators who could be sent to war at any moment, Kernel, one of the largest Ukrainian agroindustrial companies, world leader in the production and export of sunflower oil, has started hiring mostly women, even in those positions considered predominantly male because they are physically demanding.

“To minimize the risk of losing collaborators, from February 2022 we started looking mainly for female workers, even for those tasks usually carried out by males.Men can suddenly leave for the front and it would be difficult to replace them – he explained Natalia Teryakhina, Director of Human Resources of the Company -.In fact, we have started training not only men, but also women."

A hemorrhage of professionals that is difficult to stop

Even in the mine Pavlograd, north of the city of Zaporizhzhja, the women have arrived.To replace the thousand miners who left for the front since the beginning of the war, they hired 330 new workers:they manage the conveyor belts that carry the coal on the surface, they work as safety inspectors and operate the trains that connect the different sections of the mine.Karina Yatsina, 21, is one of them.“I never thought I would work in a mine,” he told the New York Times.She used to be a babysitter.

“Their help is enormous because many men have gone to fight and are no longer available,” explained Serhiy Faraonov, the deputy head of the mine which is operated by Dtek, Ukraine's largest private energy company.

However, according to a recent survey, three quarters of companies continue to report a labor shortage and according to economists, the influx of women into the job market will not be enough to fill the void left by those who went to fight.Before the war, in fact, 47 percent of Ukrainian women worked;Since the invasion began, about 13 percent of them have sought refuge abroad.

And according to Hlib Vyshlinsky, executive director of the Center for Economic Strategy in Kiev, "the women who have left Ukraine continue to be too many to allow the country to overcome the workforce shortage".