ABSTRACT
This paper develops the concept of gendered geography, the intersection of gender and spatial-organizational context read through Acker’s inequality regimes and Massey’s relational spatiality as an axis of power in its own right, to examine how women knowledge workers navigate performance management reform in a post-socialist education sector. Drawing on 42 semi-structured interviews and 120 h of ethnographic observation across six schools, the study identifies two distinct spaces of gendered extraction. Urban teachers inhabit a space of instrumental compliance, converting documentation performance into career currency at the cost of professional authenticity and collegial solidarity. Rural teachers inhabit a space of communal buffering, deploying nomadic solidarity logics (khot-ail) to collectively absorb reform demands the state has systematically under-resourced. Both spaces levy what this paper terms a moral tax: the uncompensated surplus of emotional labor, care work, and communal maintenance on which the reform’s operational viability depends. The paper argues that the state operates as a free rider on women’s collective labor, levying a moral tax that at once sustains the reform’s compliance record and destroys the moral-pedagogical tradition it claims to serve.