Gender Attitudes in the Arab World
Veronica Kostenko presented her report at the LCSR regular seminar
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Veronica Kostenko, a LCSR junior research fellow, presented a report on “Gender Attitudes in the Arab World” at the regular seminar of the LCSR on November 1, 2012.
Her work is focused on age, sex and education as predictors for gender equality attitudes in Arab countries. Veronika uses the Arab Barometer dataset.
An empirical analysis revealed some unexpected findings. For example, it was discovered that elder people in the Arab West are more tolerant of gender equality than younger cohorts. It is very surprising since there is an opposite trend in most of the other countries of the World. Another interesting fact Veronica found out was that education does not make younger generations more liberal, whereas it does affect attitudes of older generations.
A possible explanation is that the old generation in the Arab world is more liberal because of national revolutions that took place in the Arab World around 50 years ago and shifted political attitudes of population a lot toward more secular and more liberal positions.
Finally, the hypothesis about relatively similar gender attitudes across the Arab countries was not confirmed. There is a huge difference between such countries as Lebanon where population is quite liberal and such countries as Yemen where people are much more conservative. This could be explained by different historical paths of each country.
During the discussion Andrey Shcherbak pointed out that Veronica could also pay attention to the type of economy functioning in a given society. Andrey mentioned Michael Ross’s theory that depending on the type of economy there might exist or might not working places for women which in turn determines status of women in a society.
Another comments Veronica received were to perform statistical analysis with structural equation modelling, use the “Gender Gap” data, and add other variables in model, such as the profession of spouse.
by Pavel Kuzmichev