In the new millennium, with the increased interest in the role of gender empowerment in economic development, much has been written on the status of women in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The MENA region continues to see the lowest female labor force participation rates in the world (approximately 25 percent), and one of the largest gender wage gaps, estimated to be between 20 and 40 percent (International Labor Organization 2012; Shalaby 2014; World Bank 2015). Michael Ross in his 2008 paper, “Oil, Islam, and Women,” argued that oil, not Islam is to blame for lower levels of women’s labor force in the MENA and, in turn, their political participation. Upon closer examination, however, it appears that oil may not be the most compelling argument to explain Arab women's low levels of participation in the workforce in some MENA countries. Female labor force participation in the four of the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries (Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and the Untied Arab Emirates) was significantly higher than the average for the Arab World between 1990 and 2013, and female labor force participation in Oman has steadily climbed above the average since 2000. Rather, our analysis suggests that oil-driven development could actually boost female labor force participation through public sector employment opportunities, which are available to both men and women. To this end, we combine dis-aggregated data on female labor force participation in the GCC with elite interviews in Oman and Qatar to show how women have benefited from oil-driven development and large public sectors.

This paper explores women’s entrepreneurial activities in the Gulf in light of the state attention given to promoting entrepreneurship in the region over the past decade. In the Gulf Arab countries, like in many rapidly developing economies, neoliberal growth discourse abounds. Along with this, the promotion of entrepreneurship and embrace of individual enterprise is paramount. Despite the dominance of the state in political and economic spaces, Gulf governments have embraced the rhetoric of the market and entrepreneurship. Drawing from semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and participant observation conducted between 2011 and 2014, this paper examines this phenomenon. In a region stereotyped with weak gender development outcomes, female entrepreneurship is largely cast as a positive development aimed at liberating and empowering women through individual enterprise. In contrast, this paper finds that the same forces that are meant to empower women, while on one hand succeeding, on the other often reproduce or reinforce gender norms while introducing new forms of subjugation. Gulf female entrepreneurs confront three intersecting structural logics that are difficult to overcome: the structural logic of the economy, the political logic of state control, and the logic of social organisation.

For over a decade, women from Moldova have been laboring in Istanbul homes as undocumented migrant domestics. The supply and the demand for this unusual labor migration are predicated upon neoliberal transformations in the global political economy and the feminization of migration worldwide (Sassen 1998, 2000; see also Eder 2007). But the development of this transnational labor market is also prompted, this paper argues, by shifts in local moral notions regarding women, work and what constitutes a “modern” household in Turkey. Such gendered moral economies, drive this migration and the experiences of it on the ground. In order to fully understand this transnational migration and the social transformations occurring in Turkey then, this paper attends to these subjective accounts, to the agency of migrants, and to multiple perspectives on this labor at both its supply and demand. Drawing upon 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Turkey and Moldova, this paper explores these dynamics from the perspective of workers and their employers in Istanbul. It also deploys critical discourse analysis of representations of Moldovans. The image of the Moldovan in Turkey – marked by notions of gender, but also citizenship, class, race, ethnicity, and religiosity – works with political economic conditions to construct the gendered moral economy of demand for women from formerly socialist states as domestics in Istanbul. These processes are fraught with contradiction and precarity for all parties involved, but the undocumented migrant faces the harshest consequences. Contrasting employer and employee discourses and practices regarding “desirable domestics” reveals some changes and some continuities in ideas about women, workers, and households in Turkey. Thus, this paper builds upon rich research about such transformations in households and the middle classes in Turkey (Oncu 1997; Keyder 1999, Ozbay 1999, Ozyegin 2001, among others). In this case, shifting gendered moral economies in the postsocialist/neoliberal context embed domestics and their employers in new economic practices that may offer new freedoms, but also pose new limitations. Individuals resist such limitations in some ways, but also are complicit in demarcating them. Such gendered discursive practices do not just negotiate political-economic contradictions however (Parennas 2001, 2005, 2008); they authorize the neoliberal capitalist economy (Gal 1994, Gal & Kligman 2000a; see also examples in Ong 1987, Mills 2003, Brennan 2004).