The Gender Contract under Neoliberalism: Palestinian-Israeli Women's Labor Force Participation

Abstract

This paper interprets the pressure to raise Palestinian-Israeli women's labor force participation within the unfolding neoliberal project in Israel, arguing that women's stalled workforce integration reflects embedded economic rationality. Poor infrastructure and discriminatory policies, combined with Israel's rapid economic privatization, set contradictory expectations for Palestinian-Israeli women: their opportunity-cost calculations include entitlements to economic protection alongside obligations to provide expenditure-saving domestic labor. Yet growing pressure and desire to join the paid workforce suggest that the gender contract may be changing. This cultural schema, which links women's economic strategizing to their sense of feminine propriety, is transforming as part of a broader transition to a market-led gender regime, with the paradoxical effect of encouraging women's employment while simultaneously impoverishing them. By dwelling on the dialectics of culture and the structure of work opportunities, and women's agency, this paper aims to resolves an impasse in the current debate on women's low workforce participation.

There Is Nobody to Rely on: Cracks in the Intergenerational Contract Among the Elders in Arab Society in Israel

“…In patriarchal Arab society, gender has a central role in determining hierarchy and division of labor, and the gender contract, as Sa’ar (2016) writes, dictates to women and men their obligations and rights. Accordingly, the main role of women is in the household and in caring for family members, and the role of men is to provide.…”

“…The feminist literature on women in minority groups such as Arabs in Israel has referred mainly to young, unmarried women or to Arab women in the labor market who are forced to contend with a work–family conflict in a traditional society (Herzog, 2004; Sa’ar, 2016). Other researchers have dealt with the relationship between older and younger women in the family (Presser & Sen, 2000), but older and ageing Arab women have been marginalized and accorded very little academic attention.…”

“…A gender contract is, according to Sa’ar (2009, 2016), a cultural script that dictates behavioral patterns toward men and women and the rights and duties of their social roles, shapes their power relations and access to resources, and preserves a particular social order. Women are expected to stay beside their ageing parents and care for them, in keeping with the gender contract that places men above them in the hierarchy.…”

Making Cheaper Labor: Domestic Outsourcing and Development in the Galilee

“…The debates over Palestinian women’s employment take place within an overarching landscape of neoliberalism. Development schemes encouraging women’s employment concurrently impoverish them through increasingly aggressive neoliberal structures (Sa’ar 2017). Female interlocutors frequently chronicled the precarious effects of employers’ cost‐cutting strategies on their well‐being.…”

“…The first pertains to the employment of Palestinians, particularly in high‐tech, which illustrates the continued securitization of Palestinian labor. The precarity faced by Palestinian workers is further structured by a gendered component, the second discourse espoused by the outsourcing industry, which frames Palestinian women as “traditional” (Sa’ar 2017). The third is peacemaking.…”