What explains the variation in women’s equality in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) after independence? Existing explanations stress religion, culture, policy changes, or economic resources. These factors cannot fully explain existing variation or why some states change more easily than others. This paper stresses the importance of political factors by building upon, and providing the first empirical test for, Charrad (2001)’s ethnographic study. Charrad (2001) argued that the more autonomy kin-based groups maintained during state formation vis-à-vis a centralizing government, the less the government supported women’s rights. This paper will make three contributions: 1) it generalizes Charrad (2001) to include all MENA countries, not only centralizing states. It does so by arguing that the more kin-based groups consolidated central state control prior to independence, the lower the rates of women’s equality. 2) The paper specifies fertility as a mechanism that links kin-based group strength to lowered women’s equality. This is because the more a kin-based group controlled the state the more important it was for kin-based groups to gain political influence through size. Women were thus encouraged to raise children rather than pursue markers of equality such as employment. 3) The paper develops an empirical proxy for kin-based group strength, despite the lack of direct measures of group size, fertility or power. The empirical test will use cousin marriage rates as a proxy for the strength of kin-based groups, and follow Ross (2008) by using female labor market participation as a proxy for equality. Cousin marriage is a logical proxy for kin-based group strength, because it captures the idea that such groups encouraged women to marry cousins to increase their size; cousin marriage helps ensure all men in the group marry, or in some cases that men obtain second wives. This is not merely another proxy for equality, since marrying a cousin does not, in and of itself, reduce a woman’s equality. Cousin marriage rates come from the Demographic and Health Surveys, Pan-Arab Project for Family Health, geneticist’s surveys and Gulf Health Surveys. Female labor market participation rates will be obtained from Ross (2008). Data as close to independence as possible will be used. The empirical test will be supplemented by historical process-tracing to show how differing structures of imperial rule influenced the extent of a kin-based group’s control over new states.