Labor Market Participation among Palestinian Women: Religiosity or Rational Modernity?

• In Event: 165 - Section on Sociology of Religion Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 10. Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Women's Religious Agency I

Abstract

In this study I seek to examine the factors that may influence labor market behavior of women in Palestine. The study is conducted on a purposeful sample of 550 married, employed and unemployed women in the “West Bank” region of Palestine. While both “Western” and local Palestinian feminist researchers argue that the Islamic religion, people’s religiosity, and the resulting patriarchal ethos explain low labor participation among Arab and Muslim women, this study seeks to problematize these claims. I argue that such claims are inaccurate and perpetuate Orientalist ideology, and seek to test their validity in the field through a survey study.
The results indicate that contrary to results of extant research, neither the type of religion, or the level of religiosity, nor even having small children were factors found to significantly impact women’s work behavior in our sample. Interestingly, however, setting the significance aside, the pattern of influence of religiosity is in the opposite direction to that found by extant research, whereby women who are most religious are more likely to be employed than other women.
The factors that significantly and consistently determine women’s work behavior are socioeconomic and ideological factors of modernity that are typically found among women in industrial societies, such as their educational attainment, work necessity, and ideological orientation. The effects of these variables remain robust and significant even after controlling for the influence of the presence of young children at home, as well as for religion and religiosity.

Author

• Randa I. Nasser, Birzeit University