The relevance of this study stems from the need to understand the life strategies of young women as a complex sociological problem in the context of the transformation of key social institutions, value pluralism, and the contradiction between traditional and modernist gender models in contemporary Russia. The article is based on data from an online survey of 5,000 young respondents (aged 14 —35) in the Belgorod region in 2025. The methodology includes a comparative gender analysis of mandatory life dispositions within the framework of economic, political, social, matrimonial, career, spiritual-moral, and self-preservation strategies. The results revealed the specificity of women's life strategies, characterized by rational adaptation to structural constraints: economic strategies are focused on risk minimization, sustainability, and social responsibility, with a lack of entrepreneurial and investment attitudes; in the political sphere, a strategy of distancing and minimalist conformism against a backdrop of deep gender asymmetry; in the social sphere, involvement mainly in executive, socially approved practices with limited attitudes towards institutional leadership; in the matrimonial sphere, there is a transition to strategic pragmatism, expressed in the calculation of the costs of having many children and a reduction in the orientation towards close intergenerational coalitions; In the spiritual and moral sphere, there is a strategy of moral autonomy and distancing from patriarchal institutions in favor of private self-development. In planning self-preservation behavior, here is a predominance of preventive practices with more modest expectations regarding life expectancy. The main conclusion from the results of the study is that the life strategies of young Russian women are not passive, but represent a rational adaptive compromise that forms a model of “limited agency”. The identified gender gaps are not the cause, but rather the consequence and mechanism of reproduction of structural inequalities. The prospects for transforming the strategies of young women are linked to the destruction of institutional barriers and fundamental reform of the gender order aimed at equalizing opportunities and obligations.
