Religious Heterogeneity and Cultural Diffusion: The Impact of Christian Neighbors on Muslim and Druze Women’s Participation in the Labor Force in Israel

Abstract

This study exploits the unique demographic structure of the Arab-Palestinian minority in Israel and their geographical immobility in order to help resolve the riddle why women in the Middle East and North Africa are less likely to participate in the labor force than women elsewhere in the world. We show that, controlling for economic variables, Muslim and Druze Arab women are more likely to enter the labor force if they live in a locality where Christian Arabs live as well. A possible explanation of this finding is the impact of social interaction among people who have different cultural schemas. Female labor force participation is rising throughout the Middle East, including among Arab-Palestinians in Israel, but the tempo of this transformation depends on various local variables, and in this article we identify one such factor, namely, the ethno-religious composition of a community.

Keywords

Arab women cultural diffusion Druze women labor market participation MENA region Muslim women Palestinian women residential segregation social inequality

Introduction

Despite the high level of labor force participation (LFP) of women in Israel, only about one in four Muslim and Druze women in Israel is engaged in economic activity in the formal economy. This relatively low rate of engagement in the labor force is similar to the overall participation rate of women in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Such a low level of LFP is commonly attributed to religion and to other cultural factors. Thus, for example, it is argued that Muslim and Arab societies place more importance on gender segregation and discourage women’s presence in the public sphere, thus discouraging women’s employment outside their homes (Jacobsen, 2007; Minces, 1982; Salman, 1987).

Growing literature on women in the MENA region challenges the focus on the cultural explanation of women’s low rates of employment and points to the diversity of female labor force participation (F-LFP) across MENA countries. A variety of economic variables are suggested to account for this variability, yet such studies have not been enough to discredit the claim that the ostensible objection to women’s equal rights in many MENA countries is a crucial factor in curbing F-LFP, and attempts are being made to reconcile the cultural and the economic paradigms.

In this article, we use the unique demographic structure of Israel and the lack of self-selection to place of residence due to the tendency of Arab-Palestinians to stay in the communities where they grew up to shed light on the determinants of the low levels of Muslim women’s LFP in Israel. We show that for Arab-Palestinians, Christians living in a community that is also composed of Muslims and Druze positively affects the F-LFP of the latter two. A possible explanation for this is that the exposure to ‘modern’ cultural patterns adopted earlier and faster by Christian Palestinians facilitates similar trends among non-Christian Palestinians. This effect illustrates the importance of cultural processes without assuming that cultural concepts and norms are static and resist adaptation to new conditions.¹

Theoretical Background

Read and Cohen (2007) claim that explaining the LFP of women from ethnic and racial minorities in the US requires expanding the models that have been constructed on the basis of research on majority white women. The main direction for theoretical expansion they suggest is what they call the ‘cultural gender norms’ which are ‘clearly significant for women’s employment, especially in non-Western, non-industrialized nations’ (2007: 1730). Read’s own study of American-Arab women demonstrates this point. Many Arab women, she argues, regard education as a resource for raising children and not as human capital (Read, 2003; Read and Oselin, 2008). Read and Cohen’s (2007) comparison of the determinants of F-LFP among different ethnic groups in the US is clearly relevant for a similar comparison between different societies, and especially for the question whether ‘culture’ should be used as a variable explaining differences in women’s paid employment in various societies. This view fits in with the revived ‘interest in culture as an explanatory variable’ (Harrison and Huntington 2000; Huntington, 2000: xiv). Many scholars, however, do not look favorably on this development and still look suspiciously at cultural explanations of international and inter-ethnic differences (Lamont and Small, 2008).

This controversy over the role of ‘culture’ in explaining social variance is especially important in the Middle East and North Africa, the region that lags behind all other regions of the world in terms of women’s employment (Moghadam, 2004; Spierings et al., 2010). In accounting for this persistent and widespread deficiency, many scholars have indeed resorted – too often unreflectively – to the Arab cultural heritage and to the religious characteristics of Islam as key factors. While the emphasis on women’s chastity and modesty have been features of many patriarchic societies throughout the world, it is widely believed that they have played a much bigger role in Arab culture and in the Muslim faith, restricting women’s movements and activity more than anywhere else (e.g., Jacobsen, 2007; Minces, 1982; Salman, 1987). In many Muslim societies, women’s work, clothes, and movement are still legally regulated by the state, and even where they are not subject to such legislation, strong Islamist movements exert pressures on women to follow traditional proscriptions (Ahmed, 1992; Anwar, 2009; Haddad and Esposito, 1998; Joseph and Slyomovics, 2001; Kandiyoti, 1991; Mernissi, 1993). Feminist and post-colonial critiques challenge the essentialist assumptions behind the view that Muslim and Arab cultures are inherently more inimical to gender equity than other societies but they do not deny the harsh conditions Muslim and Arab women face (Abu-Lughod, 2002; Ahmed, 1992; Haddad and Stowasser, 2004; Sonbol, 2010).

Scholars who feel uncomfortable with culturalist accounts claim that low F-LFP in the MENA region is, as in other countries, a consequence of their economic structure and the specific development of their polity (Kandiyoti, 1991; Moghadam, 1998, 2003; Shukri, 1999). As a consequence of those economic and political factors, F-LFP rates greatly differ across the Muslim world. For example, in 1991, F-LFP was only 9.8% in Iran, 11.1% in Algeria, and 13.2% in Jordan, while in Libya it was 24.4%, in Egypt 26.9%, and in Turkey 35.3%. Furthermore, in most countries, F-LFP has continued to rise: for example, in 2010, to 23.9% in Algeria; in Jordan to 28.3%; in Iran to 23.2%; and in Libya to 41.7%.² Such figures demonstrate that under favorable circumstances Muslim women do join the workplace, politics, and voluntary associations (Clark, 2003; Clark and Schwedler, 2003; Joseph and Slyomovics, 2001; Moghadam, 2003, 2004).

Demonstrating the impact of economic and political variables on the female labor force, the consequent variance of women’s participation rates among Arab and Muslim countries, and the rising rates in almost all those states are enough to dispel what Lamont and Small call ‘thin understanding of culture’ (2008: 76), according to which Arab and Muslim cultures are powerful enough to block women’s entrance into the labor force. Yet such evidence is not enough to disprove the claim that ‘Islam’ and ‘Arab culture’ do have lingering influences that slow down women’s activities in the public sphere (Norris and Inglehart, 2004). It is therefore possible that F-LFP rates in Muslim countries diverge due to differences in the strength of religious authorities, their adjustment to industrial societies, and their alliances with other social forces (Anwar, 2009; Charrad, 2001; Clark and Schwedler, 2003; Clark and Young, 2008). Acknowledging both structural and cultural influences, several researchers have used quantitative methods in an attempt to isolate and measure the impact of each factor. Yet since the ‘measuring’ of culture is very indirect and imprecise, evidence about relative importance of various factors is far from conclusive (Clark et al., 1991; Karshenas, 2001; Spierings et al., 2010).

Thus, the role of culture in shaping women’s status in the Middle East continues to stir up fierce controversies. The status of women in Muslim and Arab societies stands in the center of current political and ideological struggles within those societies and in the alleged ‘clash’ of civilizations between Western and Muslim societies.³ Resorting to ‘culture’ to explain different behavioral patterns runs the risk of orientalism, that is, of assuming that other peoples, Muslims, in this case, are inherently different from ‘us,’ Westerners (Ahmed, 1992; Beck and Keddie, 1978; Said, 1978). Yet people’s beliefs, conceptualizations, images, and values – that is, ‘culture’ – are an essential component of any society. They channel people’s behavior everywhere, allowing them to coordinate their expectations and work together. The question therefore is how to use ‘culture’ in our accounts without reverting to explanations that assume culture to be an immutable force that overrules all other forces.

Following Read and Oselin (2008), we think that Sewell’s (1992) discussion of resources (structure) and schemas (culture) offers a way how to do so. Swell seeks ways to explain how material resources and virtual ideas reproduce each other. One cannot decide which side is the ‘real world,’ and thus determine the other part as a mere derivative thereof. Rather they are two essential components determining each other. But in order to be able to explain social and cultural change, Sewell offers ‘a far more multiple, contingent, and fractured conception of society – and of structure’ (Sewell, 1992: 16), a conception in which different, and even contradictory cultural schemas are open to interpretation and exist in overlapping structures. This multiplicity of structures and schemas gives human agents a leeway in choosing and interpreting which cultural schema to follow (cf. Delanty, 2011; Lamont and Small, 2008; Swidler, 1986).

Read and Cohen’s (2007) analysis of the F-LFP of various ethnic groups in the US mentioned above may serve as an illustration. The experience of immigration suggests that individuals are subject to both the cultural schemas of the hosting society (often numerous, overlapping, contradictory, and flexible) and to those carried with them from their place of origin (again, potentially diverse and inconsistent); they have more ‘tool kits’ (Swidler, 1986) to choose from. Indigenous minority groups have a similar leeway. As citizens of a modern state they are subject to the norms distributed and sanctioned by state agencies, they are influenced by cultural schemas of the majority, and they are also subject to ideas and conceptualizations that originated in their own tradition. This article posits that social heterogeneity of some Arab-Palestinian communities fosters such a plurality of cultural images, thus changing the likelihood of women’s employment from that found in purely Muslim or purely Druze communities. To better understand the postulated impact of social heterogeneity, we elaborate in the next section on some of the less-known features of Arab-Palestinian society in Israel.

The Setting: Arab-Palestinians in Israel

Since the Arabs conquered the Middle East and North Africa in the 7th century, Muslims, Christians, and Jews have lived side by side in Palestine (Sabella, 1996; Tibawi, 1969). The Druze communities were established in the Galilee and Carmel mountains in the 16th century by Druze who came from Lebanon. They either established their own villages or joined villages in which Christians were present (Firro, 1999). Today, 17.3 percent of the Israeli citizenry are Arab-Palestinians.⁴ Among these Palestinians, the Muslims, all Sunni, constitute the vast majority, 82.5 percent. The Christians, who themselves are divided into more than a dozen denominations (Tsimhoni, 2001), used to be a fifth of all Palestinians in Israel in 1949 and still in 1961, but due to lower fertility and emigration (Sabella, 1996; Tsimhoni, 2001) are now just 8.8 percent of all Arab citizens. The Druze account for about a tenth (9.9%) of all Arab-Palestinians.

About 92 percent of the Arab-Palestinians in Israel live in exclusively Arab localities, while the remaining reside in mixed Arab-Palestinian and Jewish cities. The bulk of Arab-Palestinians in Israel, 57 percent, live in the Galilee (northern Israel) and most of the rest are equally distributed among what is locally known as ‘The Triangle’ (along the border between Israel and the northern part of the West Bank) and those who live in the southern part of the country (Alnaqeb/the Negev) where the native Arab population is Bedouin, a traditionally nomadic population that has undergone a long process of sedentarization in seven new towns, partly voluntarily and partly under pressure by the government (Falah, 1989).⁵

The Arab communities in Alnaqeb/Negev and the Triangle areas are homogeneously Muslim, whereas in the Galilee many villages are religiously heterogeneous. The Christians have different demographic patterns than the Muslims and Druze. They marry at an older age, and they have fewer children (Lewin, 2012). The average education of Christians is higher than that of Muslim and Druze, and consequently Christian women are much more likely to be employed than other Palestinian women. According to the 1961 census, Christians already enjoyed a higher status and larger income than Muslims at that time, and higher rates of women were employed; those findings have been corroborated by subsequent studies (Lewin-Epstein and Semyonov, 1992; Sa’ar, 1998; Khattab, 2002; Kraus and Yonay, 2000). The Palestinian groups interact with each other in all spheres of life but have remained separate, preserving their unique institutions and organization. Since each group has been exposed to distinct economic and political conditions, their cultures have evolved along somewhat different trajectories. These cultural differences are not necessarily the result of differences in religious doctrines and precepts. Hence, it should be noted that when we talk about Muslims, Christians, and Druze, we refer to distinct cultural patterns and not to systems of religious faith.⁶

Traditionally, in the Middle East, Christians and Jews were under the influence of Muslim societies and adopted similar cultural codes (Keddie, 1991; Lamdan, 2000; Read, 2003; Read and Oselin, 2008: 310–1). In Palestine, however, cultural divergence of Muslims and Christians might be traced back to differential opportunity structures due to European intrusion into Ottoman Palestine in the 19th century. During that century, new commercial cities developed along the coast following expanding trade with Europe that attracted many Christian and Jewish merchants (Sabella, 1996; Schölch, 1982). The activity of Christian churches in Palestine and the influx of Christian pilgrims also benefited Christian Palestinians. Church schools, still prominent within the Palestinian society to this day, were first built during the 19th century, and while serving the sons of some of the Muslim notables as well, their location in Christian villages hampered the attendance of Muslims from distant villages (Schölch, 1982; Tsimhoni, 2001).

‘During the 30-year British mandate,’ the Christian Palestinians ‘experienced unprecedented security and prosperity’ (Tsimhoni, 2001: 3). ‘By 1920,’ Tsimhoni continues, their majority ‘had become urbanized, … Christians formed a salient portion of the Palestinian urban middle class; they had higher and westernized education, smaller households, and a lower birthrate than the Muslims’ (Tsimhoni, 2001: 3). The socio-economic advantage of Christian Palestinians over Muslim Palestinians following the establishment of Israel might have been supported by two new factors. First, the Christians were able to restore their community organizations faster due to the support of European churches. This advantage facilitated Christians’ ‘ascendancy within Palestinian politics in Israel’ (Pappe, 2006: 155–6). Second, the Israeli state favored Christians over Muslims, presenting and treating the former ‘as more loyal to the Jewish State’ (Pappe, 2006: 155; Cohen, 2010).

The Druze religion is very different from both Islam and Christianity, but their ways of life are closer to those of Muslims than to those of Christians. Druze and Muslims share similar socio-economic characteristics, including family size, education, income, and female labor force participation. Both groups also monitor the chastity of their women and limit their freedom of movement much more strictly than Christians. We therefore subsumed these two populations under the same grouping for the purpose of this study. This is also a methodological necessity as explained below, but the similarities in life experiences of these two groups makes this merging useful for our analytical endeavor.

Since the establishment of Israel the state separated the Druze from the rest of Arab-Palestinians whereby many of them reject the label ‘Palestinian’ (Hajjar, 2001). The most noticeable feature that separates Druze from other Palestinians is the conscription of the former to and the exemption of the latter from military service (Firro, 1999). The intensified social contact between Druze and Jews due to military service might have facilitated the penetration of Western culture into Druze communities. Yet the wish to maintain group boundaries enables religious leaders to present traditional codes of behavior as part of the group’s uniqueness, and heavy pressure is put on members of the group to adhere to those codes, including women’s domesticity and modesty. The fact that many Druze men work in the Israeli armed forces (army, police, and prisons) discourages employment of their spouses due to the stability of their own employment and its generous accompanying social benefits. As a result of all the above factors, Druze women’s rates of employment as calculated by us from Labor Force Surveys (not reported here) were slightly lower than those of Muslim women until about 2000 and slightly higher since then. The statistical similarity that reflects cultural resemblance enables us to treat the Muslims and the Druze as a unified category in our analysis.

This article exploits the divergent social patterns of Palestinian Christian, Muslim, and Druze citizens of Israel to shed more light on the question of Muslim and Arab ‘culture’ and women’s participation in paid labor. It also exploits two opportune facts that create almost an experimental design. First, many Christian Palestinians in Israel reside in the same locality alongside Muslim and Druze Palestinians. In such mixed localities, the members of these groups have lived side by side for hundreds of years, and although maintaining the clear-cut boundaries that have kept them apart, they do have long-standing extensive social ties. For our goal here the key point is that in some localities there is no Christian presence, and the question is whether we will find a difference in Muslim and Druze F-LFP between those purely Muslim or Druze localities and the heterogeneous ones.⁷ Second, Arab-Palestinians in Israel tend to maintain the traditional pattern of patrilocality in their residence. This means that men build their homes near their parents’ houses. Women who marry move to the houses built by their husbands and thus live in proximity to the husbands’ parents, brothers and other relatives (Abou-Tabickh, 2010).⁸ For our purpose this pattern is crucial, because it means that there is little self-selection in place of residence among Arab-Palestinians in Israel, thus excluding the possibility that differences among various localities would be the result of the attraction of certain types of people by certain types of communities.⁹ Our hypothesis is thus as follows:

H: Other things being equal, the employment rate of Muslims and Druze women in localities where Muslim and Druze Palestinians live side by side with Christian Palestinians is higher than in communities where Christians are absent.

Data, Variables and Analytical Technique

Data and Methodology

Our aim was to compare the LFP of Muslim and Druze women in homogeneous communities with those living in heterogeneous communities. For this end we estimated the net effect of residing in heterogeneous localities on Muslim and Druze F-LFP, adopting a multilevel modeling technique (Raudenbush and Bryk, 2002). This technique enabled us to estimate the effect of heterogeneous localities, net of other locality level characteristics as well as those of individual level characteristics. Specifically, the study is based on two levels of analysis: Muslim and Druze women embedded in localities. Our data is taken from Israeli Labor Force Surveys conducted annually by the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS). We pooled together the data from 2001 to 2006 to ensure a solid number of observations even in small localities.

Our target population is comprised of Muslim and Druze women at the main employment age (18 to 45 years). In the pooled survey, this target population included 20,886 female respondents, but for several methodological and substantive reasons a few groups were excluded. First, we excluded Palestinian women who lived in mostly Jewish cities where both employment opportunities and cultural atmosphere are very different from those common in purely Palestinian localities. There were only eight such cities and we thought that their inclusion would obscure the impact of the factor that we are studying in this project. Second, Bedouin women residing in ‘unrecognized villages’ are not included in the labor force surveys, and are thus left out of our study. Third, women from the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, almost all of whom are Druze, were also omitted because the Golan residents consider themselves as Syrians and their ties with Israeli institutions and Israeli culture are much weaker than those of the Israeli Druze within the pre-1967 borders. Finally, respondents residing in localities with a pooled sample size of fewer than 150 women were excluded, as well as the very few women who lived in institutions. We thus ended up with 16,046 Muslim or Druze women, aged 18–44 years, residing in 59 localities. As Appendix 1 indicates, the study population represents 76 percent of our target population, and is fairly similar in key characteristics.

Variables

The dependent variable, labor force participation (LFP), is measured by the standard question on employment activity in the week preceding the survey. Women employed in that week, those on short leave or illness, as well as those seeking employment were considered part of the labor force and coded ‘1’ (otherwise ‘0’).

Independent variables at the individual level include: age (in years), age square; post-secondary degree (coded ‘1’ if one holds a degree and ‘0’otherwise), marital status (coded ‘1’ if married and ‘0’ otherwise); young children (coded ‘1’ if a woman has at least one child below age ten and ‘0’ otherwise); household density (number of rooms in the household divided by household size); and a set of dummies to control for year of survey. With regard to education, we refer only to post-secondary education because this level was found crucial in determining employment prospects. Yonay and Kraus (2009) for example, found that F-LFP jumped from 17 percent among Muslim women with 9–12 years of education to 66 percent among those with at least 13 years (2009: 246). We refer to children below 10 based on our calculations (not presented here) which show that having young children is what limits F-LFP regardless of their number.

At the locality level, we employed three variables to characterize the social, demographic and economic makeup of each community. The variables are calculated by aggregating the data on individuals within a locality. The first variable is our key variable in this study, namely, the religious heterogeneity of a given locality. Since the majority of the 59 communities in our data are entirely Muslim (40 localities), treating this variable as a continuum would be misleading. Hence we used a dummy variable coded ‘1’ if the community was heterogeneous and ‘0’ otherwise.¹⁰

Since many studies have already documented the positive relations between economic opportunities and F-LFP (e.g. Goldin, 1990; Huber, 1991), we tested several indicators of economic activity. We first took the size of the local labor force as a measure of total economic activity, and then checked also the relative size of public sector employment in each locality where women are much more likely to be employed (we tried both total employment in the public sector and female employment).¹¹ Since these variables had no impact we used two other locality-level variables as control variables. The first is a dummy variable for the community size, which serves as an indicator of the opportunity structure of the community. The variable was coded ‘1’ if a community had more than 10,000 inhabitants (at the middle of the pooled period) and ‘0’ otherwise. The other control variable is the locality’s economic condition. We wanted to use locality’s socio-economic index (SEI) reported by the CBS (2006), but such an index is available only for communities with more than 10,000 inhabitants. We therefore replicated this index ourselves for all the 59 localities in our study. Comparing our measure with that of the CBS for the big localities (those above 10,000 inhabitants) shows that the indices are quite similar (R² = 0.92). The CBS index that we replicated is based on three variables: household density (average number of rooms per person), dependency rate (number of individuals below the age of 18 or above 64 relative to the number of those 18–64 years old), and educational level (the proportion of individuals in the locality aged 21–65 who hold an academic certificate). We then used the parameter estimate from the regression model predicting the SEI index for these large localities in order to calculate the predicted values of the SEI index in our full set of 59 localities.¹² Appendix 2 presents the descriptive statistics of these variables.

Findings

We begin with a description of cross-community variation in Muslim and Druze F-LFP. As can be seen in Figure 1, substantial cross-community variation exists, ranging from 11 to 44 percent. The aim of this analysis is to explain this variation. Table 1 reveals that this cross-community variation is related to locality size, to locality SEI, and also to the locality religion composition, as indicated by the statistically significant associations between Muslim and Druze F-LFP and each of the community level characteristics.

Figure 1.

Muslim and Druze Women LFP rates by locality ( $\bar{X}$ = 0.24).

Table 1.

Bivariate relationships between locality LFP rates and the three locality-level variables.

			LFP	LFP
			(r)	(etha²)
Christian presence			0.128^*	0.016
Large (over 10,000)			−0.186^*	0.035
Socio-economic index			0.492^*	–.–

	Size		Religious composition
	Small	Large	W/ Christians	No Christians
LFP Rate	0.248	0.219^**	0.241	0.222^**
LFP Rate	(0.001)	(0.001)	(0.001)	(0.001)

Note: * statistically significant correlations; ** statistically significant differences.

In accordance with previous studies, Muslim and Druze women tend to work more outside their homes in more socio-economically advanced localities. A standard deviation change in the SEI is translated into half a standard deviation change in the F-LFP rate. Put differently, as Table 1 reveals, such an increase in the locality’s SEI would raise the Muslim and Druze F-LFP by almost 5 percentage points. Figure 2 illustrates this relationship. Surprisingly, Table 1 indicates that Muslim and Druze women in smaller rather than larger localities are more likely to engage in paid employment. Whereas only about a quarter of the Muslim and Druze women in small localities engage in paid employment, this number is even smaller in large localities (22%). This relation is related to in the multivariate analysis.

Figure 2.

The relationship between locality SEI and Muslim and Druze women LFP rates.

Concerning our hypothesis, as expected, Muslim and Druze women are more likely to engage in paid employment when they live in communities composed of Christians as well (see Table 1). The focus of the multivariate analysis is whether or not this pattern holds even after individual compositional differences as well as the locality characteristics are controlled for.

Multivariate analysis

This stage of the analysis focuses on the effect of locality characteristics on Muslim and Druze F-LFP rates net of individual level characteristics. Table 2 presents three models predicting F-LFP: the first model controls only for individual level characteristics, while the intercept (β_0j) is a random effect with error terms (i.e., without predictors). This model serves as a benchmark against which we can assess the amount of variance explained by the inclusion of macro-level characteristics in subsequent models. In the second model we add the three locality-level variables to explain the variation in this random effect. The third model represents our preferred model in predicting Muslim and Druze F-LFP after all possible interactions between the locality characteristics are examined (see Appendix 3 for more formal tests of alternative models).

Table 2.

Estimated coefficients from multi-level logistic regression models predicting Muslim and Druze women LFP.

	Model 1	Model 2	Model 3
Age	0.476^***	0.475^***	0.475^***
	(0.029)	(0.029)	(0.029)
Age²	−0.007^***	−0.007^***	−0.007^***
	(0.000)	(0.000)	(0.000)
Density	−0.256^***	−0.256^***	−0.256^***
	(0.036)	(0.036)	(0.036)
Children <10 at home	−0.406^***	−0.405^***	−0.403^***
	(0.077)	(0.077)	(0.077)
Marital status (married)	−1.152^***	−1.151^***	−1.153^***
	(0.081)	(0.081)	(0.081)
Education (post-sec. or academic degree)	2.822^***	2.825^***	2.824^***
Education (post-sec. or academic degree)	(0.061)	(0.061)	(0.061)
Locality SEI		−0.032	−0.074
Locality SEI		(0.166)	(0.163)
Large locality (over 10k)		−0.223	−0.063
		(0.117)	(0.138)
Religion mixed locality		0.259^*	0.542^**
		(0.126)	(0.186)
Mix × large locality			−0.495^*
			(0.245)
Constant	−8.141^***	−8.123^***	−8.239^***
	(0.439)	(0.475)	(0.477)
Random effect
Constant	0.183^***	0.159^***	0.148^***
	(0.041)	(0.037)	(0.034)
N	16,046	16,046	16,046
AIC	13,309	13,309	13,307

Standard errors in parentheses.

p < .05; ** p < .01; *** p < .001.

Source: LFS 2001–2006.

Model 1 indicates, as expected, that the effects of individual level characteristics are in line with findings in prior studies on F-LFP (Read and Cohen, 2007). For example, the presence of young children at home reduces women’s likelihood to engage in paid employment. Likewise, education is positively associated with F-LFP. In this model, however, our main interest is the random effect for the intercept, presented at the foot of the table. This figure simply indicates that the level of F-LFP varies significantly statistically across the 59 localities in the study. Our aim in Models 2 and 3 is to relate this variation to locality characteristics.

In Model 2, then, we add the three contextual characteristics and find that contrary to the bivariate analysis, the locality SEI does not have a significant effect on F-LFP, while the impact of the composition of the religions in the locality remains statistically significant. That is, our hypothesis, that in communities heterogeneous with respect to religion Muslim and Druze women are more likely to be involved in the formal labor force, is supported.¹³ Exploring potential interaction effects in the data between the contextual effects, Model 3 indicates that the effect of Christian presence on Muslim and Druze women’s employment is much more pronounced in small rather than large communities. This is illustrated in Figure 3 and can be shown by examining the parameter estimates in Model 3. Such an examination reveals that most of the advantage gained by the presence of Christian residents in the locality (γ = 0.542) in fact vanishes in large localities (γ = −0.495). A possible explanation for this result is that in large communities, the group within each religion is more self-sufficient and most people maintain ties with people of the same faith, whereas in small communities people need to go out of their faith to provide their needs.¹⁴

Figure 3.

Predicted probability of Muslim and Druze women LFP rates, by locality size, and composition of religions as predicted from Model 3 in Table 2.

Discussion and Conclusions

Our findings corroborate earlier studies that show that education increases Muslim and Druze F-LFP while having young children lowers those rates. This finding is in line with Read and Cohen’s claim (2007) that all women are susceptible to the same family and human capital factors, a conclusion that negates the view that some societies are completely different from others. Yet, the fact that the same factors affect all groups of women does not mean that there are no substantial gaps between them (Read and Cohen, 2007); communities do differ from each other in their ‘base lines.’ In multi-religion Palestinian villages and towns that also include Christians there are higher rates of participation in the formal labor market among Muslim and Druze women.

What does this finding mean? What can we learn from it regarding the more general question of cultural change, and of gender relations in particular? Since we control as much as possible for personal characteristics and the economic conditions of the community, our results suggest that Muslims and Druze behave differently in communities composed of Christians as well. Why? It is impossible to give a definite answer but we think that a reasonable explanation is the diffusion of cultural norms and ideas from one group to another. This view is in line with more recent sociological perspectives that acknowledge the importance of cultural schemas as the necessary link between social structures and the behavior of individuals (Sewell, 1992; see also Hechter and Kanazawa, 1997; Lamont and Small, 2008). Ideas about gender relations in the entire MENA region have changed considerably with new economic and political circumstances (Beck and Keddie, 1978; Joseph and Slyomovich, 2001; Read and Oselin, 2008; Spierings et al., 2010). The question then is not to adjudicate whether the causes for the relatively low F-LFP among Muslims and Arabs in the MENA region are ‘cultural,’ ‘economic,’ or ‘political,’ but to identify the factors that affect the tempo of the change of the whole social complex.

Muslim and Druze women even in the remotest villages in Israel might be influenced by ideas and values developed in modern state agencies, schools and colleges, women organizations, political parties, Israeli and foreign mass media, and places of work. These institutions may pull in different directions, but actual behavior depends on specific configurations of social networks and the resources of relevant actors. Christian communities in the same village or town might be perceived from the viewpoint of Muslim and Druze women as part of this network that might have some impact on the final valuation of female employment (cf. Lewin-Epstein and Semyonov, 1992: 49–50).

For various historical reasons, Christian Arab-Palestinians have developed differently than Muslims and Druze, and among other things, have legitimized women employment earlier and faster (see discussion above). Although maintaining the clear-cut boundaries of religion that keep the groups apart, Muslims, Druze, and Christians do have long-standing extensive ties including social, political, and economic cooperation. Our study is based on statistical data, and is not based on direct observation. Hence it is only an interpretation based on our findings and on the negation of other plausible explanations. It is also based on our knowledge of Arab-Palestinian communities from the literature. Many Muslim, Druze, and Christian children go to the same schools, including church schools where most Christian parents prefer their children to go, but have become quite popular among Muslim and Druze parents as well (Badran, 2012). Such intense social interaction creates the potential for mutual influences that may explain the fact that Muslims and Druze living with Christians in the same locality behave more similarly to Christians than their brethren living in purely Muslim or Druze communities. The fact that this effect is found only in small communities supports this interpretation, because in such communities the spatial proximity between the distinct religion groups and the lack of services provided by co-religion groups increases the likelihood of people interacting with those belonging to other religions.

We started our theoretical review with Read and Cohen’s question (2007), why people from various ethnic origins respond differently to the same circumstances. They suggested that we introduce ‘culture’ to models of women’s employment, but the question is how to do so in a way that ‘moves beyond the assumption that racial groups have inherent cultural traits’ (Lamont and Small, 2008: 76–7). In our study we compared two identical groups that differ only by the presence of another social group in the vicinity. The two are part of the same Muslim Palestinian society in Israel: they have the same cultural, political, and social institutions, and yet there is a statistically significant difference between them even after controlling for individual and community characteristics.

Of course, the experience of Palestinians in Israel is quite unique, and there are very few communities in the Middle East where people from different religions live side by side in small communities. Yet our case may inform much more common situations in which distinct social groups with divergent attitudes on gender relations interact on a daily basis. Our story is not about the triumph of ‘modernity’ over ‘tradition’ – an interpretation that assumes two polar stationary cultures (Gusfield, 1967) – but rather on the outcomes of interaction among distinct groups, interaction that changes the balance of conflicting values and concepts. It is a gradual change as part of adaptations that are omnipresent in all societies and not a ‘clash of civilization.’

Footnotes

Appendix

Appendix 4:

Association measures between locality-level variables.

	Mixed	Large	Mean
Mixed			0.33
Large (over 10,000)	0.131^*		0.70
Socio-economic index	0.193^*	0.032^*	−0.99

Note: Locality is unit of analysis. * indicates that the relevant measure of association is statistically significant at the 0.05 level.

Funding

This study was supported by Israel Science Foundation, grant no. 637/06 to the first and third authors.

Notes

Yuval P Yonay is a senior lecturer at the University of Haifa. He has written on the history and sociology of economic knowledge, the socio-economic status of Israeli Palestinians, and on the legal and political standing of lesbians and gays in Israel. In the last few years, he has been involved in two research projects on Palestinian women in the labor force and on the gay history of Israel.

Meir Yaish is an associate Professor and the Chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Haifa. His research interests lie with social stratification and mobility, sociology of education, and the puzzle of altruism. Since 2010 he serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility.

Vered Kraus is professor of Sociology at the department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Haifa. Her interests and research activity have been centered upon issues of social inequality with a special focus on the women in the labor market.

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