Unequal Citizens: A Global Assessment of Gender-Discriminating Nationality Laws

• In Event: Gender and Political Development: Old Questions, New Frontiers

Abstract

In 1950, a man living on the East or West Bank could extend his Jordanian citizenship to his non-Jordanian wife and children, but a woman could not. Sixty years later in 2010, though most people living on the West Bank were no longer Jordanian citizens, the law toward women remained the same, leaving the children of Jordanian women married to non-Jordanian men with limited access to public education, healthcare, social services, and jobs. Despite a slight policy shift in 2014, where the government decided to offer a limited number of civil rights to the children of Jordanian women and non-Jordanian men, these women remain unable to pass on their citizenship. The persistence of this gender-discriminating policy is not unique to Jordan, the Middle East, or Muslim-majority countries. Currently, there are 24 other states with nationality laws that discriminate against women and 15 states where this policy only recently changed (i.e., since 2003). Furthermore, many other countries did not allow women to pass on their citizenship until the second half of the twentieth century, including the Netherlands (1985), Britain (1981), Norway (1979), Sweden (1979), Germany (1975), and Belgium (1967). What accounts for these discriminatory citizenship policies toward women? Under what conditions do these laws persist?

This paper analyzes the factors influencing the continuation of gender-discriminating nationality laws that challenge the legitimacy of women as full citizens by testing four hypotheses based on the existing literature. The first argues that the continuation of these laws stems from the absence of international pressures on states from international organizations and conventions to adopt more equal polices (Htun and Weldon 2011; Ramirez et al. 1997). The second claims that legal change will not occur until there is greater gender equality in terms of political representation (Escobar-Lemmon and Taylor-Robinson 2014). The third contends that these laws will persist when patriarchal family laws and personal codes remain in place (Joseph 2000), and the fourth argues that these laws will not change when there is an influential conservative bloc against the reform (Howard 2009).

This paper tests each of these hypotheses using regression analysis and an in-depth case study of Jordan. First, the regression analysis uses an original global dataset of countries in 2015 to explore the relationship between the main independent variable(s) proposed in each of these competing arguments and the dependent variable of interest—the level of discrimination toward women in state nationality laws. Second, this paper takes a closer look at the mechanisms behind the persistence of these discriminatory laws by examining the case of Jordan’s failed policy change in 2014. This in-depth case study is based on personal interviews in Jordan with activists, policymakers, and women directly affected by these polices over ten months of fieldwork in Amman from 2016–2017. Overall, this paper contributes theoretically to the literature on citizenship and gender politics by examining the factors behind discriminatory policy persistence rather than change in a diverse set of cases and by carefully examining the pursuit of women’s legitimacy as equal citizens through Jordanian campaigns to remove gender discrimination from the state’s nationality laws.

Author

• Lillian C Frost, George Washington University