Female labor force in the Muslim world
Female participation and advancement in majority Muslim countries, or nations in which more than 50% of the population identifies as an adherent of the Islamic faith, have traditionally been areas of controversy.
For example, sunni Islam is the official state religion of: Afghanistan, Algeria, Bangladesh, Jordan, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Somalia, and the United Arab Emirates.
Demographics, particularly birth rates, and human capital formation through education, good nutrition, and access to infrastructure and institutions may play a role in the discrepancies between these indicators.
These indicators help clarify the economic status women hold in some majority Muslim nations and the permanence of their involvement in the economy.
One possible explanation is that so few women are active in the labor market because the demand for female employment is restricted to a few higher-paying, low-labor-intensive industries.
In patriarchal societies or rigid (high degree of difficulty for workers to move between industries) labor markets, women are more likely to be employees than employers because they do not have the resources, skills, networks, or opportunities to either be promoted within a firm or to be owners of small or medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
[29] Table 4: Percentage of Female Laborers as Employer Source: International Labour Organization Unemployment rates among women in majority Muslim countries are high.
The International Labour Organization, the World Bank, and the UN divide a national economy into three broad categories: agriculture, industry, and services.
According to the UN, whose definitions the ILO, World Bank, and other data collection bases use, agricultural work includes forestry, hunting, and fishing in addition to land cultivation.
For nations where data is available, Turkey, Syria, Pakistan, Iran, Indonesia, and Egypt had the highest percentage of female workers involved in agricultural labor than almost every other country.
[33][34][35] With respect to female workers in majority Muslim countries, women are not evenly represented on the board of directors or among the senior management positions of most of the 100 most lucrative companies in the Arab World.
[31] Regardless of the official status of Islam or the ideology of the ruling party, there exists some evidence of a glass ceiling for women in the private sector.
These firms include automotive giant Astra International, Bank Rakyat Indonesia, and electric service provider Perusahaan Listrik Negara.
However, only Gudang Garam, a massive cigarette manufacturer, and Pertamina, the largest company in Indonesia, have 2 female members on the board of commissioners.
[41] Sociologists Helen Rizzo, Abdel-Hamid Abdel-Latif, and Katherine Meyer explored cultural attitudes in majority Muslim countries subdivided by Arab and non-Arab.
[6] The Arab states studied were Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Morocco, and Jordan while the non-Arab nations were Turkey, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Indonesia.
[6] These researchers attributed these attitudes to the strong religious identity and adherence of respondents thus implicating Islam in promoting gender inequality in majority Muslim nations.
[7] According to Moghadam, women are victims of clear political, economic, and social disparities in many Islamic countries which create gender distinctions within the public and private spheres.
Moghadam specifically points to low female labor force participation across the board in Muslim states as a sign of gender inequality as do other scholars (Youseff 1978, Sivard 1985).
[43] According to Hosseini, theocratic Islamic regimes which conflate theocracy with democracy, such as Iran or Afghanistan under the Taliban, create a tension which reinforces fundamentalist, reactionary thinking.
Equal pay with men demonstrates a neutrality to gender within the workplace and may suggest functional fairness between female workers and their male counterparts.
The estimated annual income of these women were, in terms of U.S. dollars' purchasing power parity, quite low and only a fraction of their male counterparts' wages.
[20] Turkey and Saudi Arabia award women the highest annual incomes when adjusted for purchasing power parity in terms of U.S. dollars.
The World Economic Forum's 2012 Gender Report found that women in Iran, Turkey, Indonesia, and Saudi Arabia all received approximately 60% of the wages of a male for the same work.
The remuneration gap is captured through a hard data indicator (ratio of estimated female-to-male earned income) and a qualitative variable calculated through the World Economic Forum’s Executive Opinion Survey (wage equality for similar work).
[20] While the ratio of income between men and women is taken into account, over reliance on financial data may benefit more Developed countries by virtue of having larger economies which can accommodate higher wages.
The multiple subsections of the index, however, aim to condition the final measurement of economic participation and opportunity with emphasis on the ratio of wages, job advancement, and other metrics of females to males.
According to the UN, IHDI is "based on a distribution-sensitive class of composite indices proposed by Foster, Lopez-Calva, and Szekely (2005), which draws on the Atkinson (1970) family of inequality measures.
While not all encompassing and inclusive of other religious and cultural groups, these three regions, particularly the Arab States and South Asia, are inhabited by large Muslim populations.
Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Indonesia, and Bangladesh all have GII scores above the median.
