Russia’s defense industry has a severe labor shortage. Laws about what jobs women can do are part of the issue.

• Russia’s defense industry is short tens of thousands of skilled workers.

• Traditional gender roles limit women’s participation in key jobs there, the report said.

• Demographic trends and policies continue to pressure Russia’s workforce and defense industry.

Russia’s defense manufacturing sector is short tens of thousands of skilled workers – and its tough stance on women’s traditional roles could be part of it, according to new reports.

Two years into its war in Ukraine, Russia is building up its military with a record 40% of its total budget now devoted to defense. It also plans to increase the number of active duty soldiers to 1.5 million.

That requires a large amount of military equipment, and the infrastructure to support it.

And that, requires manpower, which Russia is currently struggling to find.

In January, Russian President Vladimir Putin boasted that “more than half a million jobs have been created in the defense sector in the past year and a half alone,” according to Russian state news agency TASS.

However, while the jobs may be there, the workers are not.

An analysis published this week by BBC Russia found that in one month this summer, around 90,000 defense-related jobs have been created, with salaries well above average wages.

The BBC said there are about 18,600 vacancies for operators of numerically controlled machines, or CNCs, which are used to make materials and are in high demand in manufacturing. But only 600 resumed those roles, the outlet reported.

Some of the shipments had been sitting unfilled for months, it added.

Researcher Dara Massicot, who focuses on defense and security issues in Russia and Eurasia at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, highlighted issues of manpower shortages in a recent paper on how Russia is reinventing its military.

Workers who used to fill the gap – such as migrants, students and prisoners – are now being used as soldiers to fight in Ukraine, he wrote.

“According to dynamic estimates, wartime migration and military mobilization cost about 600,000 working-age men,” Masscot said.

Russia has one untapped resource for the defense industry: women. But here it finds itself arrested.

Since the 1970s, women in Russia have been barred from a number of important jobs in the defense sector, for fear of harming their offspring or becoming pregnant, according to Masscot.

“Women are not allowed in certain jobs that are considered physically dangerous,” she wrote, giving examples such as those dealing with hazardous chemicals or heavy metals, which bar many jobs in the defense industry.

Women are also banned from jobs such as mining, heavy lifting, operating heavy machinery, heavy metal, and handling various chemicals, he added.

In contrast, 5% of US welders are women, according to the American Welding Society — a tiny fraction of the workforce that still equates to tens of thousands of available workers.

“Russia prefers to import foreign workers and use prisoners instead of changing the labor code (since the 1970s) to allow Russian women to do certain types of jobs,” Masscot wrote in X this week.

But Russia is in a demographic situation, which pre-dates COVID and the provocation of war in Ukraine.

By the end of 2023, Russia had a record 5 million workers in all sectors, according to an estimate from the Russian Academy of Science’s Institute of Economics, Reuters reported at the time.

The decline of Russian workers is predicted to continue until 2040, writes Masscot.

Meanwhile, Russia now depends on war to keep its economy from collapsing, putting enormous pressure on its workers. Economists say that the war is the only thing that prevents Russia from entering a state of rapid economic collapse.

However, Russia appears to be focusing on long-term solutions to its demographic issues, with a strong return to traditional roles for women.

Putin recently recalled a time when women “had seven or eight children, and maybe more,” adding that “large families should be the norm,” reported El País.

Last summer, Russian Health Minister Mikhail Murashko proposed policy changes that would limit women’s access to abortions, saying there is a “brutal practice” of prioritizing a woman’s career before children, according to El País.

This will bring women to defense to produce a strong cultural and political base, Masscot told X.

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