This research deals with the issue of gender equality in Macedonia during the period of transition from
the socialist system to the one of parliamentary democracy. It refers to a period when this country faced
a deep process of political and institutional transformation with economic and social consequences that
influenced the level of human development of the citizens. For what concerns its political aspects, the
transformation processes implied a total system change, where the previous concept of socialist
citizenship based, as it will be explained, on economic and social rights, has been substituted by the one
characteristic of democratic states and comprising political, civil and social rights. Political pluralism
has been introduced; the constitution and national laws reformed permitting to citizens to freely
exercise their rights by engaging in politics, formal through political parties and informal through civil
activity, and in the economy. Within the latter, the transition implied a fundamental change in the
property relations and in the economic performances, where social property (i.e. the property of the
labour class) of the land, the enterprises and the immovable had to be transformed in private property
and the regulation of the economic development transferred from the state institutions to free market
mechanisms.
Considering the complexity of these changes, the main question that can be posed is whether and to
what extent the transitional policies produced gender based inequalities?
Gender is understood as a socially constructed definition of women and men, i.e. it refers to the social
dimension of the sexual differences and opposes the reduction of these differences to bodily or
biological differences.