More gender equity means more development. Improving gender equity is not only a goal with an intrinsic value. A substantial body of research highlights the linkages between gender equity and the achievement of other development goals, such as health, education, social and economic rights fulfillment, and even growth.

“The lobby of the Metropole, Moscow's lovingly restored grand hotel a few blocks from Red Square, is almost deserted on this gray spring afternoon. That's just fine with Jeffrey D. Sachs, a boyish-looking 38-year-old Harvard professor who is now probably the most important economist in the world. He has appropriated a cluster of comfortable armchairs for a meeting with two members of his team, Americans who work full time in Russia. The agenda is Russia's safety net or, more precisely, whether unemployed workers will be able to make ends meet.

It may appear as though the subject of gender and gender norms is a fairly recent socio-political phenomenon – particularly in Eastern Europe and Central Asia – but it does, in fact, have a longer history than might initially be thought, even in the former Soviet Union; its effects can still be felt and observed today.

Back in 1991, I attended a big “Does Socialism Have a Future?” conference hosted by my alma mater, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The session I remember most vividly featured a Hungarian dissident, a poet, ridiculing ineffective communist propaganda. “Communists”, he told a sympathetic audience, “tried to convince us that jeans can cause impotence in young males and that Coca Cola is bad for people’s health”.

Here is a question that has bothered me for a while and I am surprised that nobody else seems to have asked it before: How comes Western countries had the better orchestras (collectives) and the Soviet Union the better classical music soloists during the Cold War? Would one not expect the contrary?