Yet decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, significant backlashes to women’s equality and power have occurred. Dedicated funds are not regularly set aside to perform gender assessment at the design stage or to monitor and evaluate outcomes. In addition women are being slotted into gender-stereotypical and lower-paying career paths in universities and are leaving high-earning careers, such as engineering. This has the potential to increase the wage gap in the region, further deepening segmentation of an already gender-segmented labour market and decreasing women’s economic productivity, financial sustainability and autonomy.