Gender Relations and Transition to Motherhood in the Post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan

This chapter deals with the influence of gender relations on transition to motherhood in Kyrgyzstan. Although a shift of fertility towards older age was dominant in the post-Soviet space during the recent decades, some post-Soviet countries with mainly Muslim population showed stability of age patterns, with the peak of women’s fertility remaining below 25. Kyrgyzstan is one of those countries, and the authors investigate whether the parameters of gender relations are at least partly “responsible” for the lack of fertility postponement there. It is shown that among the Muslim peoples of Kyrgyzstan, first marriage hazards are positively related to low education of a woman, approval of husband’s violence towards wife, and others and are declining from elder to younger birth cohorts. Meanwhile, first birth hazards among married women demonstrate no relation to gender asymmetries. The analysis has shown that the lowering of first marriage hazards for younger cohorts can be due to certain modernization of gender relations and loosening of the traditional norm that prescribes early marriage for women. This is accompanied by a low social acceptability of out-of-marriage fertility. Under these conditions, younger women are likely to enter the first marriage mainly after they have consciously chosen to have children. This supports the relatively early timing of first births in Kyrgyzstan.