Russia's labour market has a growing demand for unskilled migrant workers from other CIS countries. Migrants who have worked in managerial or professional positions in their home countries almost always see their status decline once they move to Russia. In contrast, less skilled workers easily find jobs of similar status in Russia, according to Elena Varshavskaya, Professor of the HSE's Department of Human Resources Management, and Mikhail Denisenko, Deputy Director of the HSE's Institute of Demography

People's lives today are more flexible, while individual biographies – even though they may look like 'games without rules' to an outsider – are in fact carefully designed around personal choices. These are the main themes of a paper by Sergey Zakharov and Ekaterina Mitrofanova published in the monograph Russia and China: Youth in the 21st Century. Although the paper focuses mainly on young Russians' reproductive behavior, its content goes beyond demographics and addresses certain existential aspects, such as non-stereotypical biographies of modern people and their diverse identities, values, ​​and desires

Twenty-five million Russians would be prepared to move from cities to the countryside if offered the same living standards in terms of income and available infrastructure. While these conditions cannot be met in Russia at the moment, it is still possible for the government to take steps to encourage urban dwellers to move to rural communities, according to the study Motives, Conditions and Consequences of Migration from the Cities to the Countryside in Russia by Maria Neuvazhaeva, Masters' graduate of the HSE's Faculty of Sociology

Life scenarios in Russia have changed substantially over the past 50 years; individual biographies are now more diverse, while different life stages, such as going to school, starting a family, getting a job, and retirement, are no longer linear and do not always follow a pre-set sequence. Perhaps the most unpredictable are the life courses of people born in the mid-1970s whose entry into young adulthood coincided with the beginning of market reforms in Russia. Alla Tyndik and Ekaterina Mitrofanova have studied Russians' life courses over the past 85 years

Generally in Russia, being childless is an involuntary situation associated with infertility, age, and being single. However, being childless in Moscow is often a deliberate decision. Aside from a biological inability to bear children, childlessness in Moscow is likely to be associated with higher levels of education, income security, the structure of the family of origin, and certain attitudes, i.e. that having children is not necessary for happiness, according to Svetlana Biryukova, Research Fellow of the HSE's Centre for Studies of Income and Living Standards

Children attending Moscow schools who are born to migrants from CIS countries often encounter difficulties adapting to their new environment. In research published in the HSE's online journal Demoscope Weekly, Zhanna Zayonchkovskaya, Yulia Florinskaya, Dmitry Poletaev, and Ksenia Doronina argue that educational institutions must help them master the Russian language and to overcome issues arising during the teaching process

Married men and women, on average, earn more than single individuals. But while for men getting divorced means a drop in earnings, the opposite is true for women – they achieve higher earnings after divorce and remarriage, according to a study by Lilia Rodionova, presented at the Tenth International Conference on Applying Multivariate Statistical Analysis to Economics and Quality Assessment hosted by the HSE

Grown-up children usually help their parents with housework and care for them when they are sick, while the parents provide financial support and help raise their grandchildren, Anna Mironova, Junior Research Fellow with HSE’s Center for Studies of Income and Living Standards, said in the report ‘Private Intergenerational Transfers in Terms of Demographic Aging in Russia’

Russia faces a situation where orphans, rather than potential adoptive parents, have to go through a selection process. To change this, adoptive families should become professional, while orphanages need to be downsized and open to the community, says Svetlana Biryukova, Research Fellow of the Centre for Studies of Income and Living Standards

The number of women giving birth for the first time after the age of 45 has increased in Russian clinics. This category of women is hete rogeneous and includes those misdiagnosed as infertile, those who were childfree but who changed their minds, and also women who put off having children because of social and economic factors, say Olga Isupova and Nina Rusanova in their report during the HSE XV April Conference on Economic and Social Development

Relationships within Russian families are being transformed. While most people in the country still think that mutual support between the different generations within a family are necessary, these traditions of ‘family service’ are receding into the past. Russia is becoming more oriented to Western cultural values, including the priority of individual interests, reported Cecile Lefevre, Irina Korchagina and Lidya Prokofieva at the HSE XV April International Academic Conference on Economic and Social Development

The growth of assisted reproductive technologies (ART) such as in vitro fertilization (IVF), surrogate motherhood, etc, have changed our very idea of parentage. The concept of a parent as an integral and inseparable whole is now being broken down into a number of different roles – there are ‘genetic’ mothers, ‘birth’ mothers and ‘feeding’ mothers while fathers can be ‘genetic’ or ‘social’. This atomisation of parenthood explains the prevailing ambiguous attitude towards ART as Olga Isupova, Alexei Belianin and Anna Gusareva showed in their presentation at the HSE XV April International Conference ‘Economic and Social Development’, in the ‘Demography and Labour Markets’ Section