Archaicism or Modernization?
On March, 29th, 2012, Veronika Kostenko gave a talk on “Impact of Age and Education on Gender Attitudes in the Arab World”.
On March, 29th, 2012, Veronika Kostenko, Research Assistant at the Laboratory for Comparative Social Research gave a talk on “Impact of Age and Education on Gender Attitudes in the Arab World”. The study aims to explore impact of such parameters as age, sex and education on attitudes toward gender equality in different fields. Research had been started recently; despite it some interested findings were presented in the report.
The project is based on data from the first wave of Arab Barometer Survey. Veronika created index of gender attitudes which was used as the dependent variable. To proceed from results of the study it may be concluded that in the Arab World two simultaneous trends are developing, namely, modernization and archaization. Up to the date, statistic on seven Arab countries has been treated.
The list of independent variables in the model includes age, sex, country, religion, frequency of reading Quran, education. Many results of the exploration were expected. The most liberal country in the sample is Lebanon; the most conservative one is Yemen. Men are more conservative than women. Those Muslim who read Quran every day are the most conservative; individuals who never read it are the most liberal.
Nevertheless, there are some interesting findings in the research. For instance, people elder then 75 are the most liberal group in the Middle East while the most conservative group includes individuals of 25-34 years old. In addition, the least educated people of the age group of 65-75 have the most liberal attitudes on the gender equality while representatives of the youngest and most educated age group (25-33) have very strong conservative and chauvinistic attitudes. They believe that men should have more rights than women.
Author tried to explain this phenomenon from the historical point of view. In discussion after the report some other possible explanations of those findings and advices on empirical testing of them were suggested.
By Olga Basmanova