When the World Bank assessed Kazakhstan in its 2024 Women, Business and the Law index, the country scored 75.6 out of 100 – above both the global and regional averages, with perfect scores for freedom of movement, marriage, and property rights. On paper, that suggested formal barriers to women’s participation in the economy had largely disappeared. And legally, that is largely true. The problem facing Kazakhstan’s economy is not what the law allows. It is what happens after the law has already given permission.
Economists usually look for the causes of slow growth in taxes, investment, interest rates, or labor productivity. Social norms rarely make that list, even though they can quietly suppress a country’s economic potential for years without ever appearing in macroeconomic statistics. They do not show up as a separate budget line or feature in GDP forecasts. Yet it is social norms, not laws, that ultimately determine whether an economy makes full use of the human capital it has already created.
The division of economic roles by gender was once rational. Economies were built around physical labor and agriculture, where men’s greater physical strength offered a clear advantage, while high birth rates and the absence of modern medicine required women to devote much of their time to childcare. That model helped families survive and reduced uncertainty. But today’s economy, where knowledge has long become more valuable than physical strength, and where growth is driven by services, finance, and intellectual work, operates under a different set of rules. Kazakhstan, where these sectors are expanding faster than resource industries, has already begun to feel that shift more than many other countries.
When society continues assigning roles based on gender rather than ability, it voluntarily limits its own potential. Economically, this is no different from the inefficient allocation of capital or technology. The only difference is that the resource being misallocated is people. When talented individuals are prevented from working where their skills create the greatest value, the country produces fewer goods, fewer services, and fewer effective management decisions than it otherwise could. The missing tax revenues are not lost. They are simply never created.
The conventional assumption is that society changes first and the economy follows. Kazakhstan’s experience over the past decade challenges that view. The economy has become significantly more sophisticated, with rapid growth in services, finance, and digital technologies. Yet according to UNDP, gender bias in Kazakhstan has remained almost unchanged over the same period – a period the report explicitly describes as “a decade of stagnation.” In other words, economic growth alone does not erode social norms as quickly as theory suggests. Waiting for rising incomes to solve the problem on their own has clearly not worked in Kazakhstan over the past ten years.
The persistence of these norms reflects more than personal beliefs. People also tend to overestimate how conservative those around them really are, and Kazakhstan’s data illustrate this almost perfectly. Seventy-five percent of men agree that women should work and earn their own income. Yet only half believe women should have full control over how they spend that income. This is not a contradiction in survey responses. It is precisely the mechanism described in the research. People may express support for more flexible gender roles, while continuing to behave according to traditional expectations because they assume everyone else still believes in them. At the same time, 53.6% of women and nearly 68% of mencontinue to view caring for the family as a woman’s primary responsibility. The divide, therefore, is not between a progressive minority and a conservative majority. It exists within the same individuals.
These norms do not constrain only women. Men are expected to provide for the family, remain continuously employed, and shoulder financial responsibility, with little social acceptance for stepping outside that role – even when a different division of responsibilities would be more efficient for a particular household. The economy of dual-income families has already arrived, and an increasing number of professions require the same skills regardless of gender. The norm that expects men to be the sole breadwinner has not.
This is where a particularly important point emerges for Kazakhstan. According to UNDP, fewer than 40% of the country’s citizens are familiar with the very concept of “gender equality.” That means discussions framed around rights and equality are unlikely to resonate with much of the public. Framing the issue in economic terms is far more likely to do so: lost growth, unrealized innovation, weaker productivity. This is not a change of subject. It is a change of language – one that may prove far more effective in a country that scores highly on the World Bank’s WBL index while its social norms remain stubbornly unchanged.
The most expensive tax is not always imposed by the government. Kazakhstan has already completed the part of the job that can be written into law, as the World Bank index confirms. The remaining gains lie not in passing new legislation, but in changing the norms that laws alone cannot reshape. Government cannot dictate those norms directly, but it can stop reinforcing them. More importantly, this conversation should not be framed as a debate about values. It should be understood for what it really is: a question of economic efficiency and of growth that Kazakhstan continues to leave on the table.
Aidar Kakimzhanov, independent expert, specifically for www.economyKZ.org
