Increasing the Number of Women in the Workforce in the Middle East

(Illustration by Raffi Marhaba, The Dream Creative)

In a 2023 speech, UN General Secretary António Guterres declared that the world is 300 years away from achieving gender equity—an outlook increasingly supported by evidence that progress for women over the past decade is gradually coming undone. The US Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade and thus the constitutional right to abortion in 2022, and the Taliban’s recent ban on girls’ education in Afghanistan are just two troubling examples.

Harvard University Professors Erica Chenoweth and Zoe Marks refer to this trend
as “the revenge of the patriarchs,” a series of repressive actions characterized by pushback against women’s economic, political, and personal rights. And although it is happening worldwide, its impacts are particularly pronounced in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, where patriarchal dynamics permeate both family life and the state. In these settings, cultural values and norms, legal frameworks, and governance structures tend to prioritize and reinforce the rights and preferences of men and elders.

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The MENA region has one of the smallest female labor forces worldwide; an estimated 18.4 percent of women participate in the formal economy compared to the global average of 48 percent. This is a striking reflection of discriminatory systems and entrenched norms, which include pervasive gender-based violence, rigid interpretations of religion that restrict women from accessing work, and limited political participation. Across the region, these forces combine to exclude the majority of women from the marketplace, making them more vulnerable to poverty and deprivation.

Entrepreneurship: An Incomplete Solution

An oft-proposed solution to poverty and women’s limited access to the formal economy is entrepreneurship. However, the prevalence of entrepreneurship programs can inadvertently drive women away from the formal economy, exposing them to exploitation and reliance on short-term contracts, and hindering their access to vital social security benefits for themselves and their families.

Another problem is that that entrepreneurship programs are often tailored to women with specific skill sets such as digital innovation, culinary abilities, or crafts, and who have an interest in developing their own businesses. They are not always relevant to women with different abilities and ambitions. A woman we interviewed about working in Lebanon told us, “Every other month, in my village, there is some sort of training for women to become entrepreneurs, and while many women are admirable and able to establish their own businesses, not all of us want to become entrepreneurs, and that should not mean that we remain without decent jobs.”

Leaders and organizations looking to support greater workforce inclusion thus need to take a more multifaceted and contextualized approach that, importantly, avoids shifting the onus of change onto individual women. “I feel personally very empowered, but I cannot stand up to everyday racism, violence on the streets, and the biases in promotion decisions. It’s not me who should change and be more empowered, it’s the government and my boss,” explained a working woman from Morocco we interviewed.

This is why the SAWI Project (sawi means “to equate” in Arabic) and its predecessor, the KIP Project, adopted a feminist participatory approach that engages both employers and employees across different sectors and nations. Our multi-country initiative, funded by the US Department of State’s Middle East Partnership Initiative and housed at the American University of Beirut and the University of Ottawa, partners with employers to reform employment policies and practices to ensure that they promote women’s inclusion. Our process involves working with local civil society organizations and universities, students, scholars, statisticians, business leaders, and human resource professionals to identify barriers to workforce inclusion, analyze data, and co-design solutions. We also help employers implement new policies and build capacity for long-term monitoring.

While country- and organizational-level challenges differ widely depending on markets and women’s experiences, we have found three striking similarities and pervasive challenges to reforming discriminatory organizational cultures across the MENA region. These include insufficient data; a lack of policy and infrastructure to support inclusion; and the lack of a common agenda among funders, leaders, and organizations—particularly universities—that can enact change. Tackling these challenges in tandem has allowed our organization and partners to effectively increase women’s economic participation across diverse socio-cultural and geographical contexts.

Addressing the Data Deficit

The MENA region is data-starved generally, but in some countries and sectors, data on women’s work experiences, and human resource (HR) policies and practices related to women’s recruitment, retention, and promotion is virtually non-existent. As a result, employers aiming to construct more inclusive workspaces often find themselves building in the dark. The absence of meaningful statistical comparisons of sectors, and the marginalization of women’s voices and experiences cripples effective strategy development and compounds barriers to women’s inclusion in the workforce. Without a clear benchmark or baseline, organizations struggle to measure their progress or implement strategic changes.

The first step to supporting inclusion is understanding the origins and nuances of the problems women and employers face. To gain insight into employer policies and women’s work experiences, we collected survey data from 3,310 local employers and interview data from more than 980 women to develop two indices: the KIP Index and the Lived Experience Index. This initiative aimed to gather knowledge as a basis for carving out a route to dismantle the structural impediments to women’s inclusion; the indices provide a foundation on which to build targeted solutions that tackle the origins of the problem. With human resource data relating to the average number of women recruited, positions occupied by women, what types of policies exist, and whether policies are enforced, we can help human resource departments develop evidence-based, tailored pathways for improving their policies and practices. Our data points also include women’s perceptions of formality and informality in recruitment and selection procedures, access to promotion and training, and willingness to report harassment at work. The SAWI Project continues to collect new data every two years to generate long-term, comparative insights.

Putting Policy and Infrastructure in Place

While data is essential, it’s just the starting point. Achieving workforce inclusion—which the SAWI Project defines as women’s dignified participation, including agency, safety, and equal treatment in the workplace and beyond—requires dedication to driving real-world change through enacting new policies and practices. Our focus in this respect is making tangible, concrete alterations to human resources that speak to the unique challenges and opportunities of the MENA region, specifically via direct and active engagement with employers.

One example of our work in this area is a recruitment, retention, and promotion mini-certificate program, which trains organizational leaders on tools that support the development and implementation of inclusive policies and organizational cultures. For example, many women encounter verbal or physical abuse trying to get to work. As a working woman from Jordan told us, “People think that I am not working as a nurse anymore because I got married, but the truth is that it is dangerous to go back and forth from the hospital. Should I be risking my life to get an income?” The program helps employers understand unique challenges like these and adopt concrete policies that support harassment-free workplaces, offer daycare benefits, and establish transparent promotion opportunities for women. One large employer in MENA offers employees free transportation to and from work, particularly valuable in areas of conflict and instability. The program has also fostered a transnational network of more than 500 responsible businesses across the MENA region.

The SAWI Project also uses a partnership model, where partners in each country collaborate with local employers to craft theoretically robust and practically feasible human resource policies. So far, these partnerships have generated 112 policies, all designed to be flexible and considerate of the unique economic, social, legislative, and cultural contexts of different MENA countries and sectors.

Beyond this, we continually engage with our country partners through workshops, training programs, and consultations, with the shared goal of working hand-in-hand with local employers to smoothly integrate new policies and mechanisms for monitoring and evaluation into existing HR systems. In 2023, our team partnered with 80 organizations to undertake this work. These co-created initiatives not only help employers become more adept at promoting women’s inclusion in their workplaces, but also make the wider ecosystem (including policy makers, industry leaders, and the public) more aware of the need for change and effective avenues to realizing it.

Centering Universities Around a Common Agenda

The SAWI Project team is interdisciplinary and spans multiple countries, sectors, languages, and generations. We’ve learned that solving intricate societal challenges requires diverse perspectives, expertise, and resources. However, it’s important that everyone involved works with a common agenda and that the people and institutions at the heart of the effort can think and work holistically. In our case, we engage with the challenge of women’s workforce inclusion as scholars, deeply rooted in a feminist participatory approach. This enables us to organize researchers, employers, and legislators around women’s right to dignified and sustainable work, while ensuring that our solutions are academically sound, as well as socially and practically relevant and effective. Indeed, academic institutions can drive social and economic progress by fostering innovations and serving as epicenters for positive change.

The only way forward is all-hands-on-deck. We intend to continue solidifying existing partnerships toward a long-term strategy of monitoring progress, adapting to crises, and improving and institutionalizing employer and government policies. In doing so, we hope to set an example for other universities in other parts of the world to collect essential data, support the implementation of change, and collaborate with others around a common agenda to protect the economic, political, and personal rights of women and empower them to succeed.

SSIR works with publishing partners in six countries to produce local language editions of SSIR that help foster social innovation, learning, and knowledge exchange worldwide. Each local language edition has its own unique character and approach to informing and inspiring innovators in the regions they cover.

Read the Arabic language version of this article here.

Read more stories by Charlotte Karam, Carmen Geha & Lina Daouk-Öyry.