ERDENEBULGAN, ARKHANGAI PROVINCE, MONGOLIA — Ulziisuren Dugarjav was hugging her youngest son and cuddling with him when her oldest looked at her and said: “You never hugged me or slept with me.”

When Ulziisuren told him, “Mommy used to cuddle and kiss you just like this when you were little,” her son responded by saying that he did not remember any of that.

Six months after giving birth to her oldest son in 2010, Ulziisuren, 37, a mother of three, went back to work. Until he was 3, her son lived with his grandparents. “We give birth and send our children to our parents like cuckoos; we become such bad parents,” she says. When her youngest son was born in 2019, Ulziisuren chose a different option. After working as an accountant for the Mongolian National University of Arts and Culture for eight years, she chose to be a full-time mother and raise her son all by herself.

At the time, choosing to raise her child also meant letting go of her career, and she says she felt like she had “abandoned” her profession and “lost” herself. In Mongolia, more women than men obtain higher education, but their participation in the labor market is 12% lower than that of men. Among those ages 20 to 39, women’s participation is 30% lower than men’s. This is the age bracket when most women leave the workforce citing reasons such as childbirth and child care.

Odonchimeg Batsukh, GPJ Mongolia

Ulziisuren Dugarjav records a video of her children — Chingim Tuvshintulga, 13; Chingun Tuvshintulga, 9; and Chinbileg Tuvshintulga, 3 — and her husband’s relative, Tumurbold Tuvshintur, 13, reading a book at their home.

Mongolian mothers and women have been locked out of the labor market for a long time. But recently, women have become one of the most surprising beneficiaries of the societal shift to remote work that was prompted by the coronavirus pandemic and has been slowly picking up since.

Prior to the pandemic, online work was a rarely discussed avenue in Mongolia, except in the form of a few online shopping services. Ariunaa Shagdarsuren, head of the Mongolian Women’s Employment Supporting Federation, a nongovernmental organization that aims to ensure women’s right to work, says remote work “opened up the possibility for women in particular to participate in the labor market.” Independently or with the aid of newly formed agencies, women in the country are slowly transitioning to online work while continuing to take care of their children.

One agency helping these women is Momade, a virtual assistance platform founded in August 2020, during the pandemic. Momade is based in every one of the country’s 21 provinces, providing opportunities and trainings so that mothers willing to work from home can sell their services. Through these women, the agency delivers over 40 kinds of services in the fields of banking, finance, human resources and web development to 600 partners.

“Sixty percent of mothers working with Momade are either those staying at home after childbirth or mothers who gave birth to two, three children in a row, despite graduating from the university,” says Badamtsetseg Lkhagva, the agency’s founder.

Odonchimeg Batsukh, GPJ Mongolia

Ulziisuren Dugarjav participates in a monthly online meeting from her bookstore in Erdenebulgan soum. She opened the bookstore this year, using the savings from her remote work.

Ulziisuren is one of those mothers. She gave birth to her youngest son in 2019 and moved to Arkhangai province with her family the following year. While she was looking after her 1-year-old son during the pandemic lockdowns, she also suffered from postnatal depression. Since 2020, she has been working as a contract accountant for Momade’s finance branch.

“It is great that I can work in my profession and look after my children, juggling both simultaneously,” she says.

Amartuvshin Amarsaikhan is another mother who started working from home since the coronavirus outbreak. Amartuvshin is the manager of Medremjtei Medeeley, an Ulaanbaatar-based training program implemented by stakeholders including international and local organizations for the media. She says working remotely not only helps her save day care costs but also gives her more time to spend with her son.

To support mothers, the government allocates Mothers with Salary, an allowance for mothers caring for their children, that is 11 times less than the minimum wage. This amount, Ulziisuren says, is not even enough to buy a bag of diapers.

Odonchimeg Batsukh, GPJ Mongolia

Ulziisuren Dugarjav, left, discusses a children’s book with a customer, Chimgee Myagmarpurev, at her bookstore in Erdenebulgan soum.

While this shift to remote work is recent and propelled by the pandemic, conversations have been happening for some time around the flexibility of remote work and its effects on women’s participation in the labor market.

As social perceptions surrounding remote work improved, Mongolia’s labor law was amended last year. Now, a teleworker in the country has the same rights and obligations as other employees, and labor laws, collective agreements, collective bargaining and internal labor norms apply to all in the same way.

“If the government provides support and discounts for such jobs carried out by mothers, it will be a promising investment rather than allocating allowance for everyone,” says Momade’s Badamtsetseg.

Last year, the Ministry of Labor and Social Protection implemented the Women’s Employment Support Program. The program provides short-term training to support working from home and online. “Research has not yet been conducted, but from practice, we know that women’s telework is increasing,” says Altantulga Bor, head of the ministry’s Department of Employment Support.

Jumping back into the labor market has raised Ulziisuren’s hopes. In the future, she hopes to work in the international market, albeit online. “Trying my best so far and achieving all of this by myself has given me self-confidence” to dream more, she says.