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As the institutions of classic patriarchy erode in Qatar, women are entering the labour force in growing numbers. It is argued that women's need to work in societies historically characterized by classic patriarchy causes them to enact strategic accommodations that signal their feminine respectability and conformity to male domination. We find the Qatari context to be characterized by structural rather than individual accommodations of patriarchy. State institutions and several employers have made available gender‐segregated workplaces that facilitate women's employment while maintaining many elements of patriarchy. Using semi‐structured interview data with university‐aged Qatari women, we examine attitudes towards employment, specifically those related to gender mixing in the workplace. Young women's narratives reveal complex schemas regarding the acceptability of gender mixing, which depends on characteristics of the working woman, characteristics of the men with whom she must interact in the workplace and the spatial organization of the workplace itself. Women's protection of their reputations, critical to maintaining their families’ support and their own marriageability, emerged as a key motivation for limiting interactions with men. The preference for gender‐segregated workplaces reveals Qatari women's continued subscription to the patriarchal bargain — they constrain their behaviour in return for protection from male kin.

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Intimate partner violence (IPV) against women is widespread, but its implications for their economic and non-economic activities are understudied. Leveraging new data from 564 ever-married women aged 22–65 in rural Minya, Egypt, we estimated logistic regressions and zero-inflated negative binomial regressions to test spillover, compensation, and patriarchal bargaining theories about the influences of women's exposure to IPV on their engagement in and time spent on market, subsistence, domestic, and care work. Supporting compensation theory, exposures to lifetime, recent, and chronic physical or sexual IPV were associated with higher adjusted odds of performing market work in the prior month, and exposures to recent and chronic IPV were associated with higher adjusted odds of performing subsistence work in this period. Supporting compensation and patriarchal bargaining theories, exposures to recent and chronic IPV were associated with more time spent on domestic work in the prior day. Supporting spillover and patriarchal bargaining theories, exposures to lifetime IPV of all forms were associated with lower adjusted odds of performing mostly nonspousal care work in the prior day, and this association was partially mediated by women's generalized anxiety. Women in rural Minya who are exposed to IPV may escalate their housework to fulfill local norms of feminine domesticity while substituting economic activities for nonspousal care work to enhance their economic independence from violent partners.