Facing Barriers
Palestinian Women in a Jewish-Dominated Labor Market

Analyzes the labor experience of Israeli Palestinian women, arguing that state policies and widespread discrimination hinder their labor force participation and success.

Vered Kraus (Author), Yuval P. Yonay (Author)

9781316649978, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 18 June 2020

301 pages, 74 b/w illus.
15 x 23 x 2 cm, 0.45 kg

Palestinian women have slowly become active in the formal labor market in Israel. In this book, Vered Kraus and Yuval Yonay describe and analyse the labor experience of these Palestinian women, and explain why Palestinian and Jewish women have different rates and outcomes in the labor market. Challenging popular views that ascribe these differences to Arab culture and Islam, they instead find that it is state policies and widespread discrimination that hinder Palestinian women's participation and success. By including the various Palestinian sub-groups - Muslims, Bedouins, Druze, Christians, non-citizen residents of Jerusalem - this book shows how the specific life circumstances of the women from these subgroups affect their employment and achievements. The book thus enriches the acute discussion on the labour market experiences of Muslim and Arab women in the Middle East and North Africa and in advanced industrialized societies.

1. Why Arab and Muslim women participate less in the labor market than other women?
2. The subordinated citizens: Palestinian Israelis in historical, social, and economic contexts
3. Changing demography: trends of educational attainment, marriage patterns, and fertility
4. Slowly but steadily: Muslim women enter the labor market
5. Limited success: Muslim women's standing in the labor market
6. Far and isolated: Bedouin women in the Naqab
7. Residents but not citizens: the annexed women of Jerusalem
8. The 'favorite minority'? Druze women in the labor market
9. The half-full glass: Christian women in the labor market
10. Conclusion: the politics of employment in an ethnocracy.

Subject Areas: Economic history [KCZ], Middle Eastern history [HBJF1]