Women’s Economic Empowerment in Kazakhstan: Institutional Trust, Economic Participation, and Sociocultural Barriers

The paper explores institutional trust, women's participation in the economy and politics in both urban and rural areas of Kazakhstan, considering regional differences between these areas. The research is quantitative in its approach that combines both Latent Class Analysis (LCA), which explains latent attitudinal categories, with Change-Point Analysis to determine key turning points in Gender Inequality Index (GII) over a 16-year time series from 2008 to 2023. The study finds a high level of gender perspective disparity between urban and rural areas in Kazakhstan, in addition to essential changes in gender inequality levels. The results show that institutional trust plays a vital role in shaping women's participation in the economic sphere, with a lower level of trust correlated with a decrease in labor force involvement and career growth. In addition, two key turning points in gender development have also been identified in 2019 and 2022, which are linked with government reform as well as socioeconomic alterations.