Gendered Work Attitudes in Baltic Russian Speakers

Abstract

The purpose of the present research is to compared gendered work attitudes held by Russian speakers in Estonia and Latvia to the attitudes of ethnic majorities in these countries. The empirical research is based on the European Value Study data from the wave of 2008. The results demonstrate that ethnolinguistic identity may have, as in the Baltic case, an important effect on attitudes apparently unrelated to ethnonational issues. Yet this effect differentiating an ethnolinguistic minority from an ethic majority is counteracted with the impact of objective factors shared to a large extent by a minority and a majority within a given country and working in the opposite direction to the ethnolinguistic identity – by bringing the two groups’ attitudes closer to each other. The relative liberalism or conservatism of the expressed attitudes, as we discovered, strongly depend on priming. Ethnolinguistic identities (in the Baltic case, shifting Russian speakers’ views towards the more conservative Russia) have relatively stronger effect when dealing with subjective phenomena such as feelings and norms, while economic situation comes to the forefront for attitude towards objective, directly observable factors with direct and obvious consequences for an individual’s material well-being.