The paper describes the labour market position of Hungarian women and men aged 21–44 from Transylvania, within the context of gender role values and norms, based on the survey "Turning points of our lives – Transylvania", conducted in 2006. The several forms of gender inequalities on the labour market – occupation and unemployment rates, economic inactivity in its various forms and lengths, occupational segregation and the gender pay gap – have been central to sociological gender analysis in post-socialist societies. Even so, the prognosis formulated at the beginning of the 1990s, according to which women would be placed among the losers of economic restructuring, was seldom tested by Romanian or Transylvanian studies. In the first part of the present article the description of the female labour force is followed by the reconsideration of the ‘high female unemployment rates’-thesis. The first part of the paper ends with the linear regression model which analyses the gender pay gap, trying to explain it using socio-demographic and professional variables. The second part of the article sets out to interpret the traditional value systems that characterize the majority of those questioned.
The traditional gender role definitions equally adopted for the private and the public spheres, correspond to the labour market realities met by both women and men in Transylvania. The author is a sociologist and works as a teaching assistant at the Sociology Department at the BBU, Cluj (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.).

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