European Sociological Review VOLUME 21 NUMBER 2 APRIL 2005 149–163 149 DOI:10.1093/esr/jci010, available online at www.esr.oupjournals.org © The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oupjournals.org Cherchez la Femme: Women as Supporting Actors in the Russian Labour Market Sarah Ashwin and Valery Yakubovich It is well known that women have inferior labour market opportunities in post-communist Russia, but little is known about their role as labour market intermediaries. This paper examines how women compare to men in this role. We base our analysis on qualitative and quantitative data, gathered in the Russian city of Samara in 1999. We find that women are more effective than men in helping their contacts into jobs, but that these jobs are lower paid than those provided by men. Our explanation is that while women’s position in the labour market restricts their access to information about good jobs, their leading role in the household implies intervention in the lives of others, including as persistent labour market intermediaries. Introduction In her influential study of the relationship between gender roles within nuclear families and the social networks in which families are embedded, Elizabeth Bott found that women were notably more active than men in keeping up kinship ties and, in this context, were the ones who persuaded male relatives to help one another get jobs (Bott, 1971 [1957]: 135–136). Despite the prominence of both gender and network themes in the sociology of labour markets, Bott’s insight went unnoticed in that lit- erature. One exception is the work of Margaret Grieco, which, on the basis of case study research among blue collar workers in the UK in the 1980s, finds a similar pattern: ‘females link the employment chances of their spouses to the male kin of their family of origin and vice versa’ (1987: 36), partly by servicing and managing the ties between the two families. Other available studies consistently show the lower diversity and narrower out- reach of women’s networks vis-à-vis men’s: they include more kin and neighbours and fewer coworkers (Marsden, 1987; Moore, 1990; Marsden and Gorman, 2001). This suggests, as Bott argues, that women are confined to a ‘behind-the-scenes’ role. In this article, we explore the role played by women as labour market intermediaries in contemporary Russia – a context which is significant both because of the high labour participation of women, and because of the importance of networks within the post-communist labour market. One of the reasons for the relative neglect of gender issues in the sociology of labour markets and networks may be purely methodological. Sociologists of labour markets simply assume that the characteristics of the contact that leads to a job can serve as a proxy for the structure of the underlying network. The larger network from which these ‘productive’ ties emerge remains unobserved, which does not allow Bott’s ethnographic observation to surface in quantitative data. The other reason is substantive. Since the middle of the twentieth century, women in the developed world have left the confines of their households to enter the public economy and have therefore become capable of assisting others in