Female doctors dominated Soviet medicine by the 1930s, and in the 1970s, 30% of surgeons in the USSR were women. Because central planners valued physical labour and heavy industry over intellectual or service work, there was still a gendered division of labour in the planned economy. Once there, women could provide care for the sick and the elderly at a great cost saving to the state. ...the transition to free markets was accomplished with the unremunerated care work of women in the private sphere. When asked if, taking into account the effects of inflation, their salaries were lower in 2001 than they were in 1996, more than three-quarters of respondents agreed that they were worse off. ...health-care workers in these four countries claimed that the ability to live on their salaries was one of their “greatest worries”. ...of these ongoing legacies of economic “shock therapy”, sociologists and anthropologists find widespread nostalgia for the state socialist past across eastern Europe.