Two major questions of interest to policy makers in the Arab world include: 1. why women’s labor force participation rates have risen more slowly than in other parts of the world; 2. what the link is between poverty and women’s employment. Concerning the former, until recently Arab women’s employment rates were lower than would have been expected, given the high literacy rates in much of the region. In recent years though labor force participation rates among women have been rising. Some analysts have argued that rising female employment rates are a sign of increased women’s opportunity and empowerment, while others have argued that this may instead be a function of increased female impoverishment, which is in turn linked to high male unemployment and a rise in female headship rates. In this paper micro-level data from Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Egypt are analyzed to get at the questions: what can explain rising women’s employment, and is this phenomenon linked to shifting household patterns (more female headed households) and/or more likely to be occurring among poor women ; do how women’s employment and poverty patterns differ across different Arab countries and why. In my analysis I include a discussion of differences across countries, as well as across time (using data sets that are ten years apart in most cases) to look at how women’s employment patterns have shifted and are a function, or not, of poverty trends in the region.