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House 2010 Report in English & Arabic:
Evaluating Women's Freedom in the
Middle East & North Africa
Dalia Mogahed - March 31, 2010
Last
week Freedom House released their "Women's Rights in
the Middle East" report, on the state of gender equality in
the Muslim Middle East. The report ranked countries based on 45 criteria,
combined into five main categories, based on the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights. Study after study suggests that improving the status of women is
associated with improved child health, alleviating poverty and disease, among
other benefits. But if improved gender justice predicts these positive
outcomes, what predicts gender justice? What makes one country better for women
than another? Is it culture, or is it politics? Data from
One popular theory often put forth to explain Muslim
society's gender justice deficit can be summed up simply as "it's the
culture, stupid." Proponents of this point of view believe that societies'
legal norms are a reflection of their people's social and religious values. The
policy implication of this premise is that religious, not political, reform is
the most effective intervention to enable women's empowerment. Others prefer to
focus on politics and legal institutions, such that the legal status of women,
much like the prevalence of good governance, is relatively independent of
public perceptions. Public support for democratic principles, for example, far
exceeds the region's actual democratic development, suggesting political reform
may be a more effective focus of governance development than religious or
cultural public reeducation.
One possible way to test this theory is to examine how
public support for women's rights lines up against on-the-ground reality as
assessed by the Freedom House report. What relationship, if any, is there
between the values people espouse and the legal rights they enjoy?
In 2007 and 2009,
The Freedom House and Gallup rankings reveal some
surprising disparities. As the Table below shows, in Syria and Saudi Arabia
public attitudes in the Gallup survey are significantly higher than the
Freedom House evaluation, while in Egypt and the Palestinian Territories
Freedom House finds significantly greater performance than did Gallup. They are
not an inverse of each other either. In fact, statistically there is no
significant relationship between the Gallup and FH rankings at all. Skeptics
may dismiss this by simply saying they were measuring entirely different
things, but even the sub categories in the Freedom House rankings, which are
specifically pertaining to say "equal legal rights", a specific question
What does this mean? Public perception is not a good
predictor of gender legal realities. This suggests that poor legal conditions
for women in a given society are not necessarily a product of anti-women values
in that society. The absence of a significant relationship between public
perceptions and political realities points against the theory that culture is
the driving force behind lagging gender progress. In some countries, like
Those hoping to promote greater freedom for women in the
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