A Study of the Institutionalized Discrimination against Afghan Women at the Workplace

• In Event: Politics of Inequality in Developing Contexts

Abstract

Using post-structuralist, post-modernist, and critical feminist theoretical frameworks, I studied Afghan female workers’ workplace experiences and how they use language to describe their realities. Using an interpretive methodological paradigm, nine Afghan women, who worked across sectors and belonged to diverse backgrounds (age, ethnicity, income level, education level, social and political affiliation, religiosity ...etc) were interviewed. To fully understand participants’ experiences and the meaning they associated with those experiences, I conducted in-depth interviews, and I adopted an intersectional lens in this study. Furthermore, I studied their experiences at the interpersonal, inter-group, and intra-group levels.
The findings of this study show that the workplace “genders” Afghan women. They unanimously reported facing sexism at the intersection of ethnocentrism and ageism and they are being discriminated against based on their sex at the intersection of their religiosity and the lack of it. The results of this study confirmed the current state of knowledge about workplace institutionalized discrimination, and in doing so, found that Afghan women face structural and systemic discrimination, discrimination for performing their identities, and while participating in the masculine culture contest within their organizations.
Furthermore, they reported that, at the macro-level, certain anti-women social, cultural, institutional, and religious norms, values, and beliefs, as well as Afghanistan’s poor economic, political, and security conditions, have negatively impacted their workplace experiences. This study has important practical and theoretical implications and policy recommendations.

Author

• hasina jalal, University of Pittsburgh