One of my favourite sources of opinions and statistics is the All Russian Public Opinion Research Centre (WCIOM.ru). The government-subsidized centre runs several opinion polls every week and even though there are people who claim that interviewers cut questioning short if they are not getting the answers that would match the required results (surveys on political matters come to mind), most of the time it’s enlightening to find out what ideas people in Russia support.

However, the latest poll results on monitoring attitudes of Russians towards marriages and divorces were rather disappointing. The surveying giant had chosen not to publish the data on differences of opinions by gender and age. Thus, the huge difference of opinions between Russian women and men is no longer clear.

What Russian women think? We no longer know

The last time when we reported on the same topic polled by WCIOM, the statistics giant revealed the difference of views between Russia’s females and males.

For instance, the average age by which respondents thought a woman should get married was 23 years. But the males voted for 21, while females put the age of 25 as the desired time for nuptials. There is quite a difference in maturity between these two ages, would you agree?

This time when WCIOM reported results of 2019 poll that asked the same questions, no additional tables were published on differences in views of Russian women and men.

The press release is only giving us the average result: Apparently, in 2019 Russians believe a girl should get hitched by 24. But we don’t know whether females now think 26 is the time to say “I do”, or males now agree that girls of 21 are too young for marriage and moved the goalpost by 1 year to 22. Or possibly, guys think 20 is the right age and girls voted for 28?

It could be either of these scenarios, but we really don’t know.

WCIOM also didn’t provide any breakdown on ideas in minds of Russians of various ages. The previous research showed that younger respondents were even more eager to see women married sooner rather than later, as compared to more mature survey participants. This time we don’t know how the averages are breaking down at the base either.

So, we can only look at the general tables that unite opinions of all respondents and give us the averages

Why WCIOM decided to change the way of reporting, it’s not apparent.

We loved seeing how different the opinions of Russian women and men were. Hopefully, the next time the statistics giant will share the information more generously and bring back the categories of gender and age in the data on this particular topic.

We used to love seeing the difference in values of males and females, but it was not revealed in the latest poll data about marriages and divorces in Russia.

What an average Russian thinks of marriages and divorces

The opinions of an average Russian respondent changed slightly, but nothing revolutionary, from 2017 to 2019.

• In 2019 77% of survey takers believed that living in a formal marriage is preferable for a person, as compared to 78% in 2017. WCIOM did reveal the age breakdowns on this particular issue (although didn’t publish data by gender), so we know that among people aged 60+ the share of respondents vouching for the formal marriage is 84%, while among the group 18-24 it’s only 62%.
• 11% of respondents think that a de facto marriage would be the best option (12% in 2017). We could speculate that these 11% were mostly males, but this would be unprofessional. But what we do know, there are more people who see it as a viable option among the categories 18-24 and 25-34: 17% and 18% accordingly.
• The share of those who think that living alone is the best way went up from 5% (2017) to 7% (2019). Again, we don’t know if these respondents are mostly Russian women or men, although we’d put our bet on the second option. But what we can see, the share of young respondents ticking this box is large: 18% among the group 18-24.
• By the way, among the group 18-24 the majority of respondents are sure about their views: Only 1% of young survey participants chose the option “Difficult to answer” (by comparison, 9% of people aged 45-59 said it was hard to give a definitive response).

Differences by gender and age in responses to other questions are not disclosed, so we simply publish the actual results. You can see them in the tables below.

We’ll discuss this data in detail some other time.

Poll results

WCIOM asks the same questions year after year to be able to see how people’s views change over time. Here are the complete survey results that have been made available.

Read also:

• Why so many young Russian women are divorced?
• Divorce statistics in Russia
• 44% of Russians aged under 30 wish to emigrate
• What does ‘attention’ mean for Russian women?