Patriarchal accommodations: women's mobility and policies of gender difference from urban Iran to migrant Mexico

This paper begins from a paradox. In the 1980s and 1990s, women became increasingly mobile, especially in the developing world. Scholars generally attribute this shift to global economic pressure or to the spread of (Western) gender egalitarianism. Yet, in some places, women gained mobility just as local institutions extended policies excluding them or segregating them from men. Here, we look at two such cases: first, how women of Tehran, Iran, became the majority of bus riders just as the city segregated public transportation, and second, how women in the rural, Mexican village of San Pedro came to predominate among emigrants to the United States, even as they were excluded from participating in village politics. We use what we call “linked ethnographies” to put these two cases into dialogue. While attending to the particularities of each site, we find that in both, women gained mobility through the very policies that appeared to confine or exclude them. We call these policies “patriarchal accommodations.” They were patriarchal, because they enshrined formal gender difference associated with male dominance. They were accommodations, because they adapted existing standards of “appropriate” masculinity and femininity to global economic pressure, enabling women to work, study, and consume. We argue that patriarchal accommodations may facilitate women’s entry into the public sphere, particularly in non-Western regimes

How Islam influences women’s paid non-farm employment: evidence from 26 Indonesian and 37 Nigerian provinces

Studies on women’s employment in Muslim countries often mention Islam, but its influence is undertheorized and tests simply compare ‘Muslim’ women and areas to ‘non-Muslim’ women and areas. Here, multilevel analyses of Indonesia and Nigeria show this focus is not tenable: non-farm employment of Muslim women is not consistently lower than that of non-Muslim women, nor is it lower in Muslim-dominated provinces than in other provinces. A new theoretical frame conceptualizes religion’s influence in terms message and messenger. It is shown how different manifestations of Islam influence women’s non-farm employment, inside and outside the home. Empirically, the ideological strand of Islam is more important than differences between Islam and Christianity. In addition, when a conservative Islam is codified through Shari’a-based law women’s employment outside the home seems to be lower, but the presence of Islamic political parties seems to foster women’s access to the labor market through their focus on support for the poor