Ilo­na Mikóczy – Lívia Do­mon­kos: Sta­tus of Women in Slo­va­kia

The issue of equal­i­ty of rights of wom­en, fem­i­nis­m, eman­ci­pa­tion are fash­ion­able con­cepts today. Women’s rights form part of basic and uni­ver­sal human right­s. The neces­si­ty of the topic is shown even by the fact that the Euro­pean Union declared 2007 be­ing the year of equal­i­ty of rights of all se­xes. Although social pub­lic opin­ion – mean­ing the atti­tude that aris­es dis­pleas­ure many times even in the cir­cle of fight­ing fem­i­nists and wom­en, in our reg­ion gen­er­al­ly refus­es the issue, con­sid­er­ing it over-en­gaged with pol­i­tic­s, enforced issue. Ind­ed, Central-Europe does not belong to those region­s, where the oppres­sion of women is an unam­bigu­ous, every-­day thing.

Dras­ti­cal and gen­er­al vio­la­tion of woman’s right­s, ques­tion­ing of social­ly accept­ed com­pe­tence, muti­la­tion and total exclu­sion of woman’s rights from pub­lic life is not the char­ac­ter­is­tic of this reg­ion. The goal of this study is not to cre­ate prob­lems arti­fi­cial­ly and make con­flict­s. Its goal is not to sup­port vio­lent fem­i­nis­m, deny dif­fer­ences between women and men, and/or blind­ly argue the rep­re­sen­ta­tion of one or anoth­er sex. Although, the goal is the study is the argu­men­ta­tion of equal­i­ty of chances and the objec­tive exam­i­na­tion of the sit­u­a­tion of Slo­vak women in the soci­ety. The actu­al­i­ty of our research is sup­port­ed by sta­tis­ti­cal data. Accord­ing to the pop­u­la­tion cen­cus in 2001 Slo­va­kia’s pop­u­la­tion num­ber was 5,380 mil­lion, from which 51,4 per cent were women. Fifty-six per cent of the pop­u­la­tion live in vil­lages. Despite the high rate of edu­ca­tion, the dif­fer­ence between the aver­age wages of women and men is 28 per cent, for the ben­e­fit of the men. In the labour mar­ket the women are com­pared with men under-­rep­re­sent­ed by 13 per cent. At the Par­lia­ment they are pres­ent by elec­toral peri­ods by 15 per cent. In our study we exam­ine the role of Slo­vak women in dif­fer­ent seg­ments of the soci­ety. Gen­er­al­ly we can state that judg­ing the sit­u­a­tion of se­xes pres­ent in the soci­e­ty is in a great extent influ­enced by stereo­type­s. If we exam­ine what­ev­er seg­ment of the soci­ety, cop­ing and fight­ing with stereo­types is an inevitable and pri­mary task.
In our study we tried to define con­crete rec­om­men­da­tions even beyond this issue.