MYKOLAIV, UKRAINE—Kateryna Nahorna is getting ready to find trouble.
Part of an all-female team of dog handlers, the 22-year-old is training Ukraine’s technical survey dogs—Belgian Malinois that have learned to sniff out explosives.
The job is huge. Ukraine is now estimated to be the most heavily mined country on Earth. Deminers must survey every area that saw sustained fighting for unexploded mines, missiles, artillery shells, bombs, and a host of other ordnance—almost 25 percent of the country, according to government estimates.
The dogs can cover 1,500 square meters a day. In contrast, human deminers cover 10 square meters a day on average—by quickly narrowing down the areas that manual deminers will need to tackle, the dogs save valuable time.
“This job allows me to be a warrior for my country … but without having to kill anyone,” said Nahorna. “Our men protect us at war, and we do this to protect them at home.”
A highly practical reason drove the women’s recruitment. The specialized dog training was done in Cambodia, by the nonprofit Apopo, and military-aged men are currently not allowed to leave Ukraine.
War has shaken up gender dynamics in the Ukrainian economy, with women taking up jobs traditionally held by men, such as driving trucks or welding. Now, as mobilization ramps up once more, women are becoming increasingly important in roles that are critical for national security.
In Mykolaiv, in the industrial east, Nahorna and her dogs will soon take on one of the biggest targets of Russia’s military strategy when they start to demine the country’s energy infrastructure. Here, women have been stepping in to work in large numbers in steel mills, factories, and railways serving the front line.
It’s a big shift for Ukraine. Before the war, only 48 percent of women over age 15 took part in the workforce — one of the lowest rates in Europe. War has made collecting data on the gender composition of the workforce impossible, but today, 50,000 women serve in the Ukrainian army, compared to 30,000 before the war.
The catalyst came in 2017, years before the current war began. As conflict escalated with Russia in Crimea, the Ukrainian government overturned a Soviet-era law that had previously banned women from 450 occupations.
But obstacles still remain; for example, women are not allowed jobs the government deems too physically demanding. These barriers continue to be chipped away—most recently, women have been cleared to work in underground mines, something they were prevented from doing before.
Viktoriia Avramchuk never thought she would follow her father and husband into the coal mines for DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private energy company.
Her lifelong fear of elevators was a big factor—but there was also the fact that it was illegal for women to work underground.
Her previous job working as a nanny in a local kindergarten disappeared overnight when schools were forced to close at the beginning of the war. After a year of being unemployed, she found that she had few other options.
“I would never have taken the job if I could have afforded not to,” Avramchuk said from her home in Pokrovsk. “But I also wanted to do something to help secure victory, and this was needed.”
The demining work that Nahorna does is urgent in part because more than 55 percent of the country is farmed.
Often called “the breadbasket of Europe,” Ukraine is one of the world’s top exporters of grain. The U.K.-based Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, which has been advising the Ukrainian government on demining technology, estimates that landmines have resulted in annual GDP losses of $11 billion.
“Farmers feel the pressure to plow, which is dangerous,” said Jon Cunliffe, the Ukraine country director of Mines Advisory Group (MAG), a British nonprofit. “So we need to do as much surveying as possible to reduce the size of the possible contamination.”
The dogs can quickly clear an area of heavy vegetation, which greatly speeds up the process of releasing noncontaminated lands back to farmers. If the area is found to be unsafe, human deminers step in to clear the field manually.
“I’m not brave enough to be on the front line,” 29-year-old Iryna Manzevyta said as she slowly and diligently hovered a metal detector over a patch of farmland. “But I had to do something to help, and this seemed like a good alternative to make a difference.”
Groups like MAG are increasingly targeting women. With skilled male deminers regularly being picked up by military recruiters, recruiting women reduces the chances that expensive and time-consuming training will be invested in people who could be drafted to the front line at a moment’s notice. The demining work is expected to take decades, and women, unlike men, cannot be conscripted in Ukraine.
This urgency to recruit women is accelerating a gender shift already underway in the demining sector. Organizations like MAG have looked to recruit women as a way to empower them in local communities. Demining was once a heavily male-dominated sector, but women now make up 30 percent of workers in Vietnam and Colombia, around 40 percent in Cambodia, and more than 50 percent in Myanmar.
In Ukraine, the idea is to make demining an enterprise with “very little expat footprint,” and Cunliffe said that will only be possible by recruiting more women.
“We should not be here in 10 years. Not like in Iraq or South Sudan, where we have been for 30 years, or Vietnam, or Laos,” Cunliffe said. “It’s common sense that we bring in as many women as we can to do that. In five to 10 years, a lot of these women are going to end up being technical field managers, the jobs that are currently being done by old former British military guys, and it will change the face of demining worldwide because they can take those skills across the world.”
Manzevyta is one of the many women whose new job has turned her family dynamics on their head. She has handed over her previous life, running a small online beauty retail site, to her husband, who—though he gripes—stays at home while she is out demining.
“Life is completely different now,” she said, giggling. “I had to teach him how to use the washing machine, which settings to use, everything around the house because I’m mostly absent now.”
More seriously, Manzevyta said that the war has likely changed many women’s career trajectories.
“I can’t imagine people who have done work like this going back and working as florists once the war is over,” she laughed.
The post The Increasingly Front-Line Role of Ukrainian Women appeared first on Foreign Policy.
