Workplace inequalities have proliferated since iron curtain came down but today's freedoms are preferred to restrictions of the past

Something has happened to Polish women. Once upon a time they were equal partners, as prevalent in the workplace (if not the management) as men. Then communism collapsed – and along with it many of the gender equality measures it pretended to champion.

So that now, it is impossible to ignore the workplace inequalities that have proliferated. The difference in salaries between men and women is 25%-35%.

There is a 15% employment gap between the genders, which is still increasing. And this despite the fact that women on average do better in education than men.

There is no shortage of female aspiration – 34% of the self-employed are women, compared with 24% in the UK.

A country gender assessment in 2004 was proud to find: "The number of self-employed women outside farming in 1998 was almost five times larger than in 1985, whereas during the same period of time the corresponding number of men only doubled."

You could argue that women are setting up businesses simply because they cannot find jobs, but that would be to ignore the significant national pride attached to this post-communist spirit of business cunning.

Lucy Binkowska, 34-year-old polymath in the services industry, tells me: "People in Poland are very smart, they're ready to take risks, they're entrepreneurial." This is a point very often made.

So how did these inequalities even come about, in a country where only 20 years ago women and men were equal, by order of the communist manifesto?

Stamped into the DNA of this society, from the postwar years until 1991, was that everyone had to work; for that, there had to be equal access to education, childcare (which was mainly attached to workplaces) and care for the elderly.

The propaganda of the era, with its febrile, sweaty idealisations of manual labour, would be just as likely to feature a female bricklayer as a male one.

Maya Mortensen, who grew up under communism at its most full-blooded (she left Poland aged 23, in the early 1970s), remembers the atmosphere as very positive towards women, even while it was so intolerably politically repressive that everyone, regardless of sex, thought mainly about escape.

"The regime made absolutely no distinction between men and women. I never even thought about the division – all advance in society was open to men and women equally.

"As far as education is concerned it was absolutely equal, to the extent that at the technical universities – the very high-standard engineering universities – I think 30% of students were women" (this was in the 1960s – engineering courses at Imperial College London still have a male to female ratio of 5:1 today).

Mortensen continues: "In my family there are women my age who are roadbuilding engineers. This was normal."

To this day women are nothing like as under-represented in the sciences as they are in the UK, and not just in the "soft" sciences either.

Throughout the communist years female workforce participation was incredibly high, often cited at 90% (under communism, there was officially no unemployment, so this figure should be approached with caution).

As communism collapsed participation fell to 68% and it now stands at 45%.

Female emancipation was a cornerstone of the socialist narrative. Polish international women's day marches were a cross between the (literally) forced jollity of a Soviet street "demonstration" and the (figuratively) forced schmaltz of Valentine's Day (each year there was a national holiday, everyone had to march and men had to give women a single carnation).

This was all obligatory until 1993, though I'm not sure that there were legal sanctions about the carnations. People do still march, though the atmosphere – this year, at least – was more about historical than radical feminism.

And the issue of abortion gives possibly the most interesting insight into the strange myopia of Soviet gender politics. Abortion was legalised in 1956 where a woman was experiencing "difficult living conditions", which, functionally, meant that it was available on demand by the 1960s. But no contraception was ever provided, so women ended up with abortion as their main, sometimes only method of contraception. It's not unusual to hear anecdotes about women in their 50s who have had multiple abortions.

Dr Claire Gordon, a teaching fellow at the European Institute of the LSE, says: "Women weren't treated as women, they were just treated as another part of the workforce. And of course communists were quite keen for people to have bigger families." (This didn't work, incidentally, though the birthrate was higher than now).

Furthermore, the imposition of gender equality as a fundamental precept was only ever relevant to the world of work – partly, one assumes, because the party did not want to go head to head against the Catholic church if it could avoid it, and partly because identity politics held no interest for Soviet ideology. There was no period of consciousness raising, no time when feminine ideals were remade.

So, Gordon says: "It was taken as given that women worked – there are no conservative attitudes on that score. But on the other hand you have got very strong cultural and religious historical stereotypes, enforcing the role of motherhood and the importance of beauty. So there's a mixed picture, between something forward looking and something quite unreconstructed."

When the 1990s' new dawn of the free market exploded it would have been very passé to be heard talking about equality, for women or anyone else.

Immediately, workplace creches were lost to budget cuts (from 1989 to 2001 the number fell from 1,553 to 396); all kinds of state support for family care were stripped away (42% of Polish women still cannot work, or must work part-time, because of inadequate provision for children or other dependents); and the double bind of being an elemental mother and a productive worker went from being hard work to being impossible.

At the same time, as companies laid off employees, women were the first to be fired. In 1993 the church was suddenly re-emboldened and managed in concert with the rightwing to change the abortion law from the world's most open to one of the most restrictive.

Despite outrage about this – which contributed to the re-election in 1993 of two leftwing parties (Democratic Left Alliance and the Peasants Party) – that law remains in force.

This is not to say that nothing has been updated. There's a draft law on daycare in parliament at the moment and, apart from Spain, Poland is the only country to have compulsory balanced representation on electoral lists.

Nevertheless, by all conventional measures the end of communism has been bad for women. Yet there is no nostalgia for those years – least of all among women themselves.

It appears that – in the hierarchy of political needs – freedom of movement, freedom of expression, all the freedoms of even an economically straitened democracy, are more important.

Gossip queen

Possibly the most famous woman in Poland today – after the ubiquitous Virgin Mary – is Doda, a pneumatic blond popstar who keeps Polish gossip columns in business. Chopin aside, Doda, 27, is one of the most successful Polish musical artists of all time. She is also one of its most controversial.

Doda, real name Dorota Rabczewska, is often described as the Polish Britney Spears, but her ability to hog the limelight with outré publicity stunts are more Gaga-esque. She reportedly plans to mark the release of her new CD in May by riding a chariot through Warsaw pulled by 100 naked men.

Last week she was in the news again over a legal battle she had been waging with a Polish actor, Monika Jarosinska, who accused Doda of beating her up and threatening to kill her.

Jarosinska claims that during a public appearance in January, Doda allegedly shouted: "I will kill you, I will destroy your career, you will die of leukaemia." The actress reportedly ended up with scratches and clumps of hair missing. Police reported the incident to court, but charges were dropped owing to insufficient evidence.

For the past year Doda has been fighting blasphemy charges after saying of the Bible in a TV interview that "it is hard to believe in something written by someone drunk on wine and who smoked funny cigarettes". There has not yet been a verdict, according to her spokeswoman. If convicted of "offending religious sensibilities", she faces up to two years in prison.

In 2009 she showed her own litigious side when she sued the rapper Mieszko Sibilski, who wrote a song about her, mocking her divorce from the former Poland goalkeeper Radoslaw Majdan. rapped that Doda laughed like a horse and called her a "blachara" – a Polish insult describing women who choose their partners on the basis of what car they drive. Sibilski lost the case but is taking it to the court of appeal.

Doda also won a case against a tabloid newspaper which printed a picture suggesting that she wasn't wearing underwear. She said the Super Express had doctored the photo and sued for damage to her dignity. She wanted 100,000 zloty in damages, but a court ruled that the paper had to print an apology and a clarification that Doda was in fact wearing pants. Helen Pidd