The business outlook for Arab Women (page 1 of 3)

Here's the stark reality: the Arab world has the lowest proportion of working women in the world. Women form less than a quarter of the Gulf's national workforce, and just 29 percent of the labor force in the Arab Mediterranean rim countries: Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Syria and Tunisia.

However, the latter figure excludes female casual labor, agricultural production and domestic work. A new report, The Integration of Women's Rights into the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership, concludes that women's hidden economic contribution "reinforces their inferior status in society."

In the era of globalization, the Arab world - as the 2002 Arab Human Development Report (AHDR) points out - is at a crossroads. The report questions whether Arab states can prepare their citizens to meet the demands of global markets in a new, post-oil era. The report ranked the Arab world lowest, except for sub-Saharan Africa, in terms of gender empowerment, measured as access to political power, personal incomes and entry into the professions.

The AHDR argues that the need to empower women is among the three main barriers to Arab development, along with the need for greater personal and collective freedom and the need to improve Arab citizens' skills in relation to their incomes.

Although the future role of Arab and Muslim women will be partly shaped by cultural debates, those are arguments for theologians. In purely practical terms, there is a growing need for Arab women to support themselves - a need that governments have been slow to acknowledge.

The expansion of the female Arab workforce over the past three decades is undeniable. But are women working to secure their independence, to fulfill family expectations or to alleviate financial hardship in a developing world characterized by the feminization of poverty?

"The issue of women's employment is complex: simply having a higher rate of female employment does not necessarily reflect a higher degree of female development," the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership study claims. "It is critical to analyze the type and context of women's employment to understand why women are allowed, able or forced to work."

Since the expansion of education across the Arab world in the 1970s, women's literacy levels have improved three-fold. But in 2003, one in every two Arab women is illiterate, and this will take a generation to eradicate.

While 75 percent of Arab girls enroll in primary schools, only 50 percent complete secondary education. Although more women than men graduate from universities in the UAE, Kuwait, Oman and Bahrain, this bucks trends across the 22 nations that form the Arab world.

Today, pressures on public spending have reduced earlier Arab governments' commitments to state education. The AHDR fears that access to quality education will revert to a privilege of the wealthy. Arab women are excluded from political power, occupying just 3.5 percent of all parliamentary seats. Moroccan women hold 35 of the House of Representatives' 325 seats. Syria comes next with 25 female members of parliament, just 10 percent of the total.

Political exclusion shapes regional governments' commitment to advancing the status of women. Eight Arab countries have not signed the 1979 International Convention on Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW).

But nowhere is the gap between what Arab governments say and what they do more evident than when it comes to women's rights.