MENA’s Gendered Political Economies

Ignominously, the MENA region hosts the lowest levels of female labor force participation in the world. But gender imbricates economic life in ways beyond work, too: Property rights, debt relations, family responsibilities, and access to social insurance all evince gendered biases.

This project aims to expand the knowledge base on the ways gender permeates the economies of the contemporary MENA region. It does so through conducting research into subject matters that tend to attract less attention from gender-focused scholarship. Seeking to situate gender within the logic of wider economic systems, we pay special attention to matters such as the political economy of inheritance laws and gendered exploitation in export-oriented sectors like autopart assembly, garment manufacturing, and agriculture.