Abstract
Within the context of current Islamophobia, the status of women in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region tends to be used as evidence of backwardness of the Muslim world fueling anti-Muslim sentiments. It is therefore important to look into the topic from a scholarly point of view. For this reason, Women, Work and Patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa by Fariba Solati is timely and important. There is indeed a dearth of literature on women’s economic status in the MENA region as most academic work tends to focus on women’s social rights rather than economic status.
It is imperative to delve into some of the questions raised in the book such as the fact that the region shows the lowest formal and informal employment rate in the world in spite of high educational attainment. In addition, for the most part, the fertility rate is declining. These issues are very complex. For example, in the case of Iran, there has been a rise in tertiary education in some areas such as medicine and engineering where female graduates have a much higher percentage than in some Western countries, yet the female labor force participation (FLFP) rate remains low. As Solati points out, the relationship between education, the fertility rate, and female labor force participation remains far from simple.
As an important contribution to the field, through a quantitative analysis of Muslim countries in the MENA region, Muslim countries outside of the region, and developing countries that are not Muslim, the book sheds light on the fallacy of Islam and religion being the explaining factor for the low FLFP. Further, it argues that reliance on oil revenue cannot fully explain the discrepancy either.
The book not only covers formal employment but also the informal sector, a sector which tends not to be enumerated for women because the informal sector is highly intertwined with women’s reproductive role as home makers. Gathering data is even harder where gender segregation is more pronounced, as it creates an additional barrier to our knowledge when analyzing female labor. Often sexual segregation in the labour market in conjunction with sexual segregation in public life makes women’s work more invisible and this may explain lower measured participation in the informal sector than it is in reality.
In the last chapter of the book, Solati creates a quantitative measure to assess patriarchy proxies such as the gender gap in employment, education, maternal mortality, and the fertility rate. The results of this quantitative analysis suggest that women in the MENA region fare the worst compared with the rest of the world. In other words, Solati concludes from her quantitative analysis that women in MENA are the most oppressed compared with women in all other regions of the world. According to Solati, the victimhood of women in the MENA region leaves them without a sense of agency. Some academics may argue that the importance of the family in the region may partly be responsible for the lower female participation rate and for that reason it is worth looking into some of the qualitative work. It is entirely possible that more in-depth data gathering sheds light on the topic as the author rightly rules out religion and reliance on oil production as the explanatory reason. It does beg the question that if these two do not explain the phenomena, what other variables could be at work?
Some interesting questions may be raised, especially by feminist economists who may question her final concluding points. For instance, would it be possible that quantitative analysis, without qualitative data, may not accurately provide the whole picture? Feminist economists have been writing on the topic of women in Muslim societies, and their work shows a more complicated picture, especially where qualitative and quantitative methods are combined (e.g., Kongar, Olmsted, and Shehabuddin 2017). On this topic, it may be worth looking into the work of other scholars who have done research on women in the MENA region who present a more nuanced picture of women from that region (Chamlou and Karshenas 2017). Further, it may be thought-provoking to advance beyond the standard indices used in gender gap measures and include indices such as the percentage of female-headed households, which may alter the bleak picture that MENA is the worst place for women’s agency and give a more nuanced account. This book can be recommended to those interested in women’s economic status in the MENA region and graduate-level courses on gender and development, women in the MENA, and women in the Muslim world.