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Albania
Women in the Work Force
The female proportion of the country's wage-earning work force
increased markedly after World War II, although women continued
to bear most of the responsibility for maintaining Albanian's
households. Women had played a subservient role in traditional
Albanian society and were for hundreds of years considered little
more than beasts of burden. During Albania's Cultural and Ideological
Revolution, which began in 1966, the regime encouraged women to
take jobs outside the home in an effort to overcome their conservatism
and compensate for labor shortages. An enormous increase in the
number of preschools facilitated the entry of women into paying
jobs. By late in the decade, the regime was struggling to overcome
male resistance to the appointment of women to government and
party posts once held exclusively by men. Women accounted for
about 41 percent of the overall rural labor force in 1961 and
51.3 percent in 1983. Despite Albania's high annual birth rate
in the late 1980s, women made up about 47 percent of the country's
overall work force, including 53 percent of the labor force in
agriculture; 43.5 percent in industry; 55 percent in trade; 80
percent in health care; and 54 percent in education and culture.
In mountain areas, women made up a significantly higher proportion
of farm labor. In 1981 women accounted for 70.7 percent of the
collective-farm work force in Pukλ District and constituted a
similarly disproportionate segment in Kukλs, Tropojλ, Mat, and
Librazhd.
Data as of April 1992
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