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As Ukraine has attempted to distance itself from the Soviet past and to establish a strong and independent self-identity, ideals of masculinity and femininity have emerged that have both nationalist and traditionalist overtones. The respective emphasis on women’s domestic role and men’s role as breadwinners reinforces stereotypes that permeate all spheres of life, and these lie at the root of a series of gendered problems faced by women and men.This brief is based on a larger study (that also includes Egypt, Kazakhstan and Turkey), which explores how transition in different countries has been experienced by different groups of men, and its impacts on gender relations. It aims to assist the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and other stakeholders to consider ways of engaging men as agents of positive change for gender equality – alongside women and girls – as well as to complement women-focused projects and investments to enhance both the resilience of transitions and equality of opportunity.

There has been significant progress in gender equality globally over recent decades, such as in school enrolment or in labour force participation rates, and in certain groups of men’s and boys’ attitudes to gender equality; particularly among younger, educated males in urban areas. Yet, historically embedded structural barriers and patriarchal relations seem to counter progress in other areas – such as unpaid care work, or women’s access to property and productive resources.In the context of rising global and local economic inequalities, we have also seen the emergence of ‘backlash’ against women’s empowerment in many settings. This is relevant in many countries undergoing transitions where the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development operates. This report aims to explore experiences of men and constructions of masculinity in four significant transition countries – Egypt, Kazakhstan, Turkey and Ukraine – to consider how best to complement the Bank’s women-focused interventions in its projects and investments, within its mandate to enhance both the resilience of transitions and equality of opportunity.

In recent years, Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) have been widely used in several astronomical applications. The 40-m Thai National Radio telescope (TNRT) is under construction in Chiang Mai, Thailand. We conducted benchmarking of the pulsar processing software to evaluate the capabilities of a computer with Xeon E5-2630 and GPU GTX1080Ti. The pulsar software DSPSR was used to simulate raw baseband data, coherently de-disperse the data and generate a folded time-frequency-domain pulse profile. We experimented with combinations of bandwidth, the size of the sub-bands, a range of dispersion measure (DM) values, and parallel instances of DSPSR jobs. The result shows the processing time increases with higher values of bandwidth DM as expected. However, the processing time appears to decrease with the size of the sub-bands, that at the same total bandwidth the processing with 1.5625 MHz/channel is faster than those with 3.125, 6.25 and 12.5 MHz/channel by approximately 10, 25 and 50 percent, respectively. This indicates that the processing in DSPSR is best when the channel resolution is high, however, further investigation is needed to determine the highest optimal value. We also consider parallel processing and to this, one, two and four identical scripts were simultaneously executed in parallel, where we found that single job is six times faster than four simultaneous jobs. In principle, parallel computing is expected to be more efficient, however, this can be explored further to find the actual bottleneck in the pipeline and hardware.

Artikkeli kiinnittyy yhä laajenevaan kansainväliseen tutkimukseen tyttöydestä. Se käsittelee muutosta, joka on tapahtunut naisten kasvussa aikuisuuteen. Suurin osa alan kirjallisuudesta on toistaiseksi keskittynyt länsimaihin, mutta tässä artikkelissa tarkastellaan työväestöön kuuluvia nuoria naisia Pietarissa, Venäjällä. Kuten monissa länsimaissa, palvelusektorin uudet työpaikat ja entistä kattavampi korkeakoulujärjestelmä näyttävät tarjoavan nuorille naisille uusia mahdollisuuksia sosiaaliseen liikkuvuuteen. Perinteisiin, sittemmin köyhtyneisiin ja väheksyttyihin työelämäpolkuihin verrattuna tutkimuksessa esiintyvät nuoret naiset hyödyntävät tehokkaasti uusia keinoja rakentaen samalla kertomusta itsensä toteuttamisesta ja tehden laajempia huomioita arvostetusta naiseudesta. Silti todellinen sosiaalinen liikkuvuus on vaikeasti tavoitettavissa, sillä perinteiset luokkaan ja sukupuoleen perustuvat työelämän rakenteet rajoittavat edelleen tyttöjen mahdollisuuksia. Huolimatta tapaustutkimukseni tarkasta rajauksesta, tutkimukseni ilmentää esteitä, joita nuoret naiset yhä kohtaavat globaalissa koulutuksen ja työelämän muutoksessa.

A key strand in the Western literature on working‐class masculinities focuses on whether young men are capable of the feminized performances apparently required of them in new service economies. However, the wider literature on processes of neoliberalization – emphasizing the ‘hollowing out’ of labour markets, the cultural devaluation of lower‐skilled forms of employment, and the pathologization of working‐class lives – would suggest that it is as much a classed as a gendered transformation that is demanded of young men leaving school with few qualifications. This dimension of neoliberalization is highlighted by ethnographic data exploring the experiences and subjectivities of young workers in St Petersburg, Russia, where traditional forms of manual labour have not given way to ‘feminized’ work, but have become materially and symbolically impoverished, and are perceived as incapable of supporting the wider transition into adult independence. In this context, young workers attempt to emulate new forms of ‘successful masculinity’ connected with novel service sector professions and the emergent higher education system, despite the unlikelihood of overcoming a range of structural and cultural barriers. These acquiescent, individualized responses indicate that, while ways of being a man are apparently being liberated from old constraints amongst the more privileged, neoliberalization narrows the range of subject positions available to working‐class young men.

The need for employers to adapt to global neoliberal capitalism has led to growing flexibility in employment relations, with more peripheral workers experiencing insecurity. In post-Soviet Russia, adaptation to the global marketplace created insecurity on a massive scale, coinciding as it did with the collapse of state socialism. Enterprises cut workers’ hours and wages in order to survive, and workers were forced to develop their own ‘survival strategies’ through secondary, informal employment. Although the legitimacy of the Putin presidencies has been built on the promise of greater economic stability, recent news reports point to the emergence of significant pay arrears. This article uses employment and income data to establish current trends in income insecurity, and a recent ethnographic study of working-class men to explore experiences of precarity amongst this group. Both data sources indicate ongoing instability, as many workers continue to rely on secondary incomes to make ends meet.