Most Arabs would accept a woman as their nation’s leader but still believe men should have the final say in domestic matters, a major new study suggests. The research was carried out by the research network, Arab Barometer, between late 2018 and the spring of 2019. The places surveyed were Iraq, Tunisia, the Palestinian Territories, Jordan, Lebanon, Yemen, Egypt, Libya,…
Gender Issues
Arab spring protests and women’s labor market outcomes: Evidence from the Egyptian revolution
“We analyze the effects of the 2011 Egyptian protests on the relative labor market conditions of women using panel data from the Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey (ELMPS). Using unique information from the Statistical Database of the Egyptian Revolution, we geocode each “martyr”, i.e. demonstrators who died during the protests, based on the location of the political incident. We construct…
Tunisia: Changing Patterns of Women’s Representation
“Benstead traces women’s descriptive political representation in Tunisia from the first woman elected to parliament in 1959 to the introduction of the law of parity following the Arab spring, which commits the state to ensuring equal representation in elected institutions. Under Ben Ali’s state feminism, the Constitutional Rally for Democracy (RCD) implemented a 20% party quota in 1999, which it…
Introduction to Measuring Women’s Political Empowerment Across the Globe: Strategies, Challenges, and Future Research
“This chapter establishes definitions of key concepts such as women’s political empowerment and establishes the theoretical and empirical goals of this volume. We identify the complexities in defining women’s global political empowerment, critically review prior research on elites and masses to develop definitional and measurement goals, and tie women’s global political empowerment to broader social concerns and processes. We briefly…
Gender Inequality and Economic Inclusion in Tunisia: Key Policy Issues
….Sociocultural prescriptions about gender roles have changed less than the secular nature of the state might suggest. According to the sixth wave (2010-14) of the World Values Survey, 71% of respondents agreed that “when jobs are scarce, men should have more right to a job than women” (see Table 2). The gender breakdown suggests that more men (82%) than women…