Women, Work, and Patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa

Masculinity in the Workplace: Iranian Women Engineers’ Navigations of Hyper masculine Work Cultures

“…Patriarchy, in accounts prior to the development of more nuanced gender theories, was considered a homogenous and solid structure that explains all forms of oppression against women in all contexts (Acker, 1989). Acker suggested making a shift -from asking about how the subordination of women is produced, maintained, and changed to questions about how gender is involved in processes and structures that previously have been conceived as having nothing to do with gender.‖ While this theoretical shift is now well established in the Western literature on gender discrimination, in the context of the Middle East, the concept of patriarchy is still at the center of academic and journalistic accounts of women's oppression (Soltani, 2017;Goetz, 1997;Kandiyoti, 1988), and there is a shortage of empirical evidence and theoretical analyses to help make this shift from patriarchy to gender. In this sense, the theoretical lens that I used in this study makes a unique contribution to current debates on women's status in the maledominated labor markets of the Middle Eastern countries by shifting the center of analysis from patriarchal structures (especially the state's patriarchy) to the on-the-ground nuances of how the gender system operates independently to shape women's struggles and strategies of resilience.…”

Female Labor Force Participation in Turkey: A Synthetic Cohort (Panel) Analysis, 1988-2013

“…The "culture" factor is often brought up to explain the low participation rate of women in the Middle East (Moghadam, 2005;Diwan and Vartanova, 2017;Solati, 2017). More specifically, the fact that women are assigned the role of home makers while men are the designated bread-winners, constrains the choices open to women outside of home.…”

Gender relations in the workplace: The experience of female managers in African harbours

“…According to Neal et al (2005), women are increasingly entering the workforce in North African countries and rising to leadership positions in the public and private sectors, yet female labour force participation is lower in the Middle East and North Africa compared to other parts of the world, including regions with Muslim-majority countries (Solati, 2017). Indeed, Solati (2017) has demonstrated that it is not the dominant Muslim religion that is the root cause of low female representation in the labour force, even though male supremacy has been reinforced and legitimized by religious ideology. With the modernization of societies, the age of first conception is increasing, particularly among the middle and upper classes, from which business leaders primarily emerge.…”