The following report on the changing situation of Polish women in the 1990s covers a wide range of areas, including education, family, the labor market, and public life. The report deals also with violence directed against women, with women's place in the media and the ways in which the media represent women, with the government's policies towards women, and with the difficult question of women's health care and their reproductive rights. The report focuses on legal regulations, legislative changes, and the actual daily practice. The statistical data contained in the report is occasionally less current than we might wish. However, one must allow that statistical studies are time consuming, with results frequently published two or three years after the actual research.

After the 1989 peaceful "revolution," the situation of women in the society and the family has, in many respects, become even worse than before. The hardship of the transition period affected women more than men. Introducing certain necessary economic and social reforms was deemed a priority. While the implementation of these reforms was supposed to improve the situation of all social groups, their particular impact on women was not considered. At the same time, the rights and liberties of women became the object of attacks by ultraconservative social and political activists. After a battle of several years, a restrictive law limiting women's access to abortion was put in place. Following this development, sexual education in the schools was halted, government subsidies for contraceptives were withdrawn, and government programs for the advancement of women and for equality of women and men were forfeited. Legal guarantees protecting the woman's job during her child care leave were weakened. Attempts to pass a law to guarantee equal rights of women and men have failed, as has the attempt to set up a parliamentary commission to deal with issues of equality between the sexes. The government has not begun to carry out the National Plan of Action for Women, which was to be implemented in its first stage by the year 2000.

The question of the equality of men and women in public and family life has never been seriously debated in Poland. A traditional, patriarchal model of the family, supported by the Catholic Church, predominates. Any proposals aimed at making the opportunities of men and women equal or at eliminating gender based discrimination are being ridiculed by the right-wing politicians as a remnant of communist ideology or are condemned as contradicting natural law. The fact that what was described as women's emancipation under communism actually resulted in women bearing a double burden of responsibilities serves today as an argument in support of the traditional value system. Nevertheless, increasing numbers of women wish now to have professional careers and prefer a partnership-based model of the family, regardless of the husband's income level. Meanwhile, the Catholic Church and the conservative politicians hold that women's primary role must again consist in child-bearing and child-rearing: women may only be allowed to have professional careers provided that these do not interfere with their basic responsibilities of looking after the children and taking care of the home.

This is not to say that the past decade has seen nothing but a deterioration of women's situation. The report describes also positive changes, such as equal access to maternity leave for men and women, and an anti-discrimination clause incorporated into the labor code. The development of the National Program for Women and the co-operation among NGOs, the Government's Plenipotentiary for the Family and the Women's Parliamentary Caucus were also important successes. Women's consciousness of their rights and liberties has grown. Women are increasingly able to identify the instances and comprehend the nature of discriminatory practice.

Much of the report concerns the law, which has been analyzed with regard to guarantees of equality between the sexes. Our intention was to show that all rights are interdependent and interrelated, so that we cannot consider the position of women in the labor market or in public life while ignoring their status in the family. There is no doubt that legal regulations concerning marriage and the woman's position in the family affect her other social roles. For example, if the law puts the responsibility for child care exclusively on the woman's shoulders (when parental leave is available only to women), or if a policy fails to promote the father's involvement in family responsibilities, women's opportunities in the labor market are diminished even though the pertinent labor laws may not discriminate directly against women. On the other hand, discrimination against women in the labor market leads to their economic dependence on male partners, and consequently increases their vulnerability to domestic violence. We cannot, therefore, work successfully to increase women's access to politics or fight discrimination in the labor market if we simultaneously neglect the woman's position in the family, as it was, in fact, neglected during the communist past.

It is not enough to adopt a good law; there must also be mechanisms for its implementation. A law can be a powerful tool, which we must learn to use to our advantage. We must also learn to use any means at our disposal to change a law that is not satisfactory and that fails to provide us with adequate and sufficient guarantees.

We hope that this report offers the readers comprehensive information about the situation of women in Poland in the nineties, and that it may help to identify fields of discrimination in the law, in its application, and in everyday life. Awareness of the problem is the first step towards positive change. We also hope that by pointing to areas where the existing laws are found deficient, the present report may serve as a source of inspiration to both the legislators and the NGOs that work for equality between the men and women.

Pierwsza strona
Raport CPK
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