Serbia is seeing a growing trend of poverty that disproportionately affects women, particularly single mothers, retirees and those living in rural areas. This ‘feminisation of poverty’ limits their ability to participate actively in civic life and democratic processes.
“What can you do with 23,000 dinars?” asks Emilija* derisively about the 196 euros a month she receives as a welfare recipient.
Sitting on an improvised couch in front of a house constructed of pallets, boards and tarpaulin, the flag of the Roma people hanging above her head adding some colour and vibrancy to the otherwise gloomy exterior of the place she calls home, Emilija, 25, answers her own question with a shrug: “Almost nothing”.
Emilija and her friend Nada*, 31, live in an informal settlement on the outskirts of Belgrade made up of shacks and containers. Emilija has three children; Nada has five.
“We wait a whole month for the money and end up spending it in one day,” Emilija tells BIRN. “For example, when a child asks for a toy, or when we go out with the children, a child is a child and will say, ‘Mom, I want this’. But he can’t have it; that’s very hard for me.”
Nada finds it difficult to afford food because it’s now very expensive. “Sure, I can find clothes [in bins], but sometimes you have to buy something,” she says.
And if they do manage to buy something, they rarely get anything for themselves. Menstrual pads, a product that is taxed as a luxury item in Serbia, put a huge strain on their budgets, especially for Nada, who has a teenage daughter.
And it is proving almost impossible for them to find a job, they tell BIRN. “This is not an environment where you can leave your children behind. I would like to work, why not? It’s easier for men to find manual work, but as women we have to make a choice, we have a house and children to look after,” says Nada.
Emilija tried to find a job a few times, but it is difficult for women like her given that they will lose their social welfare if they get a job, and none of the jobs on offer last long enough to enable them to stand on their own two feet.
“I worked in the countryside a few years ago. And I worked in the Gallery [a shopping mall in Belgrade] as a cleaner. They paid 750 dinars for three hours [6.40 euros]. I would get 27,000 dinars a month, but they would not pay the whole amount at once. They give you half and keep the other half for themselves so they do not ‘lose’ you,” says Emilija.
Sarita Bradas, a psychologist and sociologist, tells BIRN that Nada and Emilija epitomise what she terms the “feminisation of poverty”, where the poverty rate among women is higher than among men because of gender inequality in all its various guises.
“To get out of poverty, you have to earn an income. To earn an income, you have to be employed. And of course, whether you are poor or not also depends on the amount of income you earn,” says Bradas.
Uneven playing field: the gender dimension
Emilija and Nada are just two of the 89,024 women who receive social assistance in Serbia, out of a total female population of about 3.4 million. According to data provided to BIRN by the Serbian Ministry of Labour, Employment, Veterans and Social Affairs, women make up more than half of all benefit recipients.
A welfare recipient receives a monthly payment of 11,674 dinars, less than 100 euros. Additional benefits are paid for other family members and children, but according to the basis for determining the amount of social assistance, a family of three (mother and two children) would receive about 18,000 dinars (153 euros). That is three times less than the amount needed for the minimum basket of goods in Serbia.
Data from Serbia’s Statistical Office shows that women of all age groups, except for those aged 55 to 64, are at a higher risk of poverty compared to men. And last year’s report from the EU’s Commissioner for Human Rights found that employed women hold lower positions even in the public sector or are less likely to be employed on a fixed-term basis, even when they have higher levels of education. The report also expressed concern about longstanding gender inequality in property rights.
In Serbia, only 25 per cent of women have property registered in their own name. The reason for this is that women are excluded from the order of inheritance in favour of male family members in more than 40 per cent of cases; on the other hand, only 0.5 per cent of men are excluded in favour of a woman. The situation is even worse in rural areas, where more than 80 per cent of women do not hold any property in their own name, while the rest typically have plots of land less than 2 hectares that are not intended for housing.
Sarita Bradas, the psychologist and sociologist, tells BIRN that the gender gap in employment is most pronounced in the group of unqualified and uneducated people. By way of illustration, Emilija has only completed four grades of elementary school, while Nada is currently in the sixth grade of elementary school for adults.
“Among women, 39.4 per cent have no qualifications, compared with 29.1 per cent of men,” she explains.
In terms of education, Bradas says the data shows that uneducated men are more likely to be employed than uneducated women. “63 per cent of men without a degree are employed, compared with only 40 per cent of women. Men are more likely to be employed in jobs that do not require qualifications. They have easier access to the labour market, regardless of their level of education, with these differences decreasing as the level of education increases,” she says.
The gender dimension is also evident in the informal sector. This sector includes the self-employed, undeclared workers, moonlighters and unpaid family workers. “If you look at the structure according to this status, 70 per cent of women are among unpaid family members, while this figure is 25 per cent for men. This means that 75 per cent of men earn an income from informal work, while only 30 per cent of women do,” explains Bradas. “As a result, they have no income and are more at risk of poverty.”
As far as social welfare recipients are concerned, women are rarely able to earn an income because they have to stay home and look after the family. “You should bear in mind that people in developed countries can live on social assistance. But here, a family has less than 20,000 dinars (170 euros). What can you do with 20,000 dinars? Can you buy food, not to mention anything else?” asks Bradas.
For Nada’s five children and Emilija’s three, the chances of escaping this vicious cycle of poverty are slim.
“The probability of attending college is 11 times higher if the parents have a high level of education than if the parents have only completed elementary school. Children from these lowly educated families are poorer, have no money for education, and of course poverty reproduces inequality,” notes Bradas.
“On the other hand, we have the problem that children from marginalised groups and poor families have almost no support for education. In rural areas, children are involved in the work process from a very early age in order to support their families,” she adds.
Man’s work for women
Even where women are employed, the discrimination is all too evident.
Mirjana is 51 years old and works in a factory that manufactures electronic components for the automotive industry. It is a physically demanding job that she describes as “man’s work”, though the factory mainly employs women.
Despite the tough nature of the work, Mirjana tells BIRN the salaries are pitiful. “Those who work on Saturdays and Sundays are paid more. I got 61,000 dinars for the whole month after 13 years, without a single Saturday. But there is also a hot meal, there are also bonuses. The hot meal is 5,000 dinars a month. One bonus is 3,500 dinars; another is 1,500 dinars. If you have Saturday and Sunday, then these bonuses are higher,” she says.
Mirjana puts up with it because she’s a mother, but feels sorry for the younger women who work there. Her daughter also worked there for a while, but left.
The long-term health consequences of working at the factory are serious. “I get injections in my elbows. I was in the hardest part of production, where women work on knots, bend their fingers, break their joints. After eight years, I had no more functioning elbows – my arms were cramped. As we were pulling the cables, I got a hernia. It’s not harmless at all, it’s not easy,” Mirjana says.
She reckons 90 per cent of the older workers are sick or injured. “One colleague suffered a vertebral fracture while pulling the system and now has screws in her neck. She’s still working. We also have colleagues who have had spinal surgery, where cysts and tumours have formed due to the physical exertion, because we all hold our hands up all the time. The women return to the line after operations,” Mirjana complains to BIRN.
There are several factories in Serbia that produce secondary raw materials and components. Most of them have received state subsidies to open their plants here. These companies mainly employ women. In March last year, two female workers died within a short period of time in two of these factories. As the media reported and their families testified, both women had shown symptoms of exhaustion, but were sent back to work even after complaining. No irregularities were found during the inspections.
Lara Koncar, an anthropologist, tells BIRN that the position of women in the labour market is unfavourable compared to men, which keeps them in a state of poverty and subjects them to different types of bullying and abuse in the workplace, including sexual abuse.
“Poverty is not exclusively due to economic relations. It also has to do with relationships between partners, kinship and family, among other things, which is especially important when women are affected by family violence… If you are in a situation where your freedom of movement in the labour market is definitely restricted, you are very likely to stay in that situation because there is no possibility of getting a job elsewhere, and that will keep you in a situation of bullying,” she says.
Koncar says women suffer many types of bullying and abuse in the workplace. There are the hidden forms of bullying, such as the inability to advance in the workplace. “We know what happens to… women who return after maternity leave, that they often return to their own position but that the advancement that was supposed to follow does not happen,” she says.
Nada Padejski, head of the Safe House for Women in Novi Sad, also sees a clear link between violence against women and their financial situation. As she explains to BIRN, this can be viewed from three angles.
“Firstly, economic dependence influences whether you leave the perpetrator or not. Secondly, whether women with a lower economic status in particular are housed in safe accommodation. And thirdly, how violence in general affects the housing and economic situation of victims of domestic violence,” she says.
Padejski says it is not uncommon for women to be unemployed precisely because of the influence of the violent offender. “In the sense that he says: ‘You do not need to work, there are two small children here, why should they go to kindergarten, it’s better to stay at home, I will give you money’. So, she stays at home with the child, they are both housed and looked after. But when violence escalates, it always turns out that the woman is unemployed and doesn’t have the right to say anything,” she says.
Padejski also cites cases where women have had to take out loans to pay off their husbands’ debts or to help them start a business, only to be left with nothing.
Padejski emphasises that domestic violence leads directly to homelessness among women. Without permanent housing offered in Serbia as a social protection service, a woman who has decided to leave a violent relationship often has nowhere to go.
“Most of these women have two or three jobs and have not made the property claim they applied for because the process has either taken too long or has not yet been completed, or they have not even started it,” she says.
Property law proceedings are also lengthy, complicated and disadvantage women. “The courts do not take into account the fact that there has been domestic violence when deciding on property law proceedings. No woman ever receives everything she has invested. The abuser usually does not pay maintenance. If she files a lawsuit, it takes too long, or it’s not paid properly, or her lawsuit is dismissed,” she explains.
Looking at the example of Novi Sad, Serbia’s second-largest city, the data shows that women rarely initiate property division proceedings – and even when they do, the courts are unlikely to rule in their favour. From 2019 to 2022, there were 2,551 divorces in Novi Sad, yet during the same period, women initiated only 17 property division proceedings, with judges ruling in favour of women in only six cases. By contrast, during the same four-year period, as many as 367 proceedings were initiated due to non-payment of child support.
Feelings of powerlessness
“Powerlessness,” Padejski concludes, “contributes to the reproduction of powerlessness.”
Mirjana, the factory worker, wonders how she can convince her children that Serbia is a good place to live, when no one, not even the mayor or state officials, speak out when workers, especially women, are clearly being exploited.
At the same time, there is a public pressure on those who are being exploited to participate in the democratic processes of the state, by staying informed and voting for change.
Bradas, the psychologist and sociologist, says that demanding the poor and marginalised bring about political change is deeply unfair. “What I resent about the so-called elites is that they blame the poor for selling their votes and warn that it is a crime. Poverty is a violation of human rights – that is the basic thing,” she says. “If you are focused on surviving and looking for any way to do that, you do hard jobs, you work in harsh conditions, for low wages to survive, and you cannot think that your vote is important. Your life is not important in this society, so who cares about that vote?”
In his first speech as prime minister earlier this year, Milos Vucevic of the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) devoted a large part of his speech to women – but not as equal members of society, rather as “sanctities for every patriot”.
“A woman must always be shown due respect, because she is a symbol of renewal, birth and victory. A woman brings new life into the world, and that makes her a being who is actually most like God,” Vucevic said.
Although he vowed that “women in Serbia will have the same rights and the same starting positions as men”, he emphasised the government is not interested in trying to creating a society of “equal incomes”.
“This is not and will not be a government that will promote the ideas of self-managed socialism,” Vucevic stressed.
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic has also spoken several times about the importance of women for the state and for SNS, estimating – without providing evidence – that more than two-thirds of the women who voted in the last elections supported SNS.
How much support women have received in return is open to debate. Between 2021 and 2023, for example, Serbia fell from 19th to 38th place on the Global Gender Gap Index.
When it comes to asking for their support, however, women interviewed by BIRN say the authorities don’t hesitate. Emilija and Nada say that “people from the ‘city’” come to their settlement before every election to warn them that if they don’t vote, they will be fined.
Asked if they receive any gifts or offers of assistance when asked to vote, they both reply: “Not this year.”
“But we did get them in the past, honestly, they even gave us as much as 3,500 dinars,” Emilija tells BIRN. “They give us a pen, we sign with that pen, return it, and then if you return the pen, you get the money.”
Nada says they both voted this year too, voluntarily, even though they didn’t receive anything in return. “We voted. Who else are we going to vote for and how? Vucic will win for sure. We have our own problems on our doorstep, we don’t have to worry about him too. Authority is authority.”
