Women, Work, and Economic Reform in the Middle East

This book has been several years in the making, but concerted work on it began in 1994, when I was a senior researcher at the World Institute for Development Economics Research (WIDER), a research and training center of the United Nations University (UNU) in Helsinki, Finland. In 1994 and 1995 I traveled through extensive interviews with officials of government agencies, donor agencies, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs); with business owners and enterprise managers;with women workers and professionals;and with economists, sociologists, and legal experts, from whom I also obtained articles and documents. I conducted interviews and observations during visits to factories, businesses, and other workplaces. In addition to gathering secondary sources published in the countries I visited, I obtained official publications to supplement the international statistical sources I used. I had employed a similar research methodology during visits to Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia in the fall of 1990. I first presented my contrasting scenarios about how economic liberalization might affect women in the Middle East and North Africa in an issue of the Wider Angle, the UNU/WIDER newsletters. At a preparatory conference of the Arab region in the year prior to the Beijing Conference of September 1995, I suggested to my collaborator, Nabil Khoury of the International Labour Office-with whom I had just edited a book on women, education, and development in the Arab region - that we organize a workshop on structural adjustment and women's employment in the Middle East and North Africa. The workshop was held in Nicosia in November 1995 with the support of the government of Cyprus. Two of the chapters of this book have been published elsewhere in different forms. A version of the chapter on Egypt was written for Coopers & Lybrand, for whom I went on a mission to Egypt as part of a USAID-funded project in January-February 1995. I prepared another version for a UNU/WIDER publication intended for the Beijing Conference. The chapter on Iran was first prepared for the annual meeting of the Middle East.