Giving Voice to Women In Muslim Countries

By Karl G. Feld

Survey research has a role to play in providing Muslim women with a public voice where custom and culture does not permit them their own. It can be used to inform and shape empowerment policies from the perspective of each population. The Women In Muslim Countries (WIMC) study, conducted by D3 Systems with contributions by KA Research for Turkey, is designed to measure women’s empowerment in actual daily practice, providing a deep look into the oft-perceived gap between current public policy and empowerment initiatives and actual practice on the personal and local levels. The answers are intended to yield a metric for promoting excellence in public policy by informing policymakers on women’s attitudes toward the affects of policy initiatives, and serving as a measure of the degree of those policies’ effectiveness.

Currently in its first year, WIMC consists of annually repeated, nationally representative quantitative research in twenty-two Muslim-majority countries around the globe. At the time of this writing, WIMC 2007 data from ten countries were available. Each country’s sampling frame was designed to provide the best possible representation of the attitudes and experience of that country’s women. Two-stage, stratified random samples were used in all cases. In the case of Egypt, the sampling frame was limited to urban areas only.

Countries of the Middle East/North Africa (MENA), South Asia, and the Balkans are included in the data presented here. The studies were conducted either face-to-face or via CATI as appropriate from March to June of 2007.

Happily, what women in the surveys perceived they needed aligned perfectly with resources generally recognized by the international development community as necessary to their advancement throughout Muslim-majority countries. These needs were financial independence, access to knowledge, and improved health. The only exception to this was Iraq, where a significant percentage of women indicated “Other—Security” as their greatest need—a response to be expected in a country experiencing widespread civil conflict and violent crime. Women living in the wealthier economies of Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and, to a lesser degree, Iran were less interested in making money and more interested in improved health and educational opportunities. Educational attainment influenced what women wanted, but in different ways in different countries.

These findings suggest that popular sentiment among women may provide the necessary support for their participation and success in reform initiatives. They also indicate that women’s programs in each country should be tailored differently and differentiated by segment within the country, according to the primary interests of the women living there. Unfortunately, financial independence, access to knowledge, and improved health, in addition to personal security, are exactly the things which, to varying degrees, Muslim-majority countries are perceived to withhold from them.

The control of property and wealth is central to the idea of financial independence and increasing earning power, and critical to earning a livelihood and providing sufficient housing and nutrition for families. Women in Muslim countries sometimes face practical challenges to exercising such property rights as signing contracts, exercising inheritance and land tenure, and getting access credit. Permission from fathers or husbands is usually required to work, travel or borrow money.

The relationship between poverty and women’s disenfranchisement from employment and control of economic resources is well known. In Muslim patriarchal societies, the control of women’s lives by men is particularly pronounced amongst the poor, whose women have little recourse to escape. The degree of patriarchal control differs across Muslim countries and is particularly well-documented in the Arab world. It is important to note, however, that the global trend toward the increasing “feminization of poverty” is not as prevalent in Arab countries as in the rest of the world.

The United Nations actively promotes the advancement of women as one solution to combating poverty by giving them greater degrees of control over property. Even in wealthier societies, where most are not held back by poverty, patriarchal customs and laws can still impede access to money and property.

The control over savings in the ten countries whose survey results are discussed here is quite mixed, with high proportions of savings in many of them controlled by the women or jointly with their spouses. In those countries with the lowest saving rates, the spouses most often have sole control. In Egypt, where 48 percent of women's households have no savings, 37 percent of those households have sole spousal control of money. In Jordan, the proportions are 38 percent and 36 percent, respectively. Interestingly, per-capita GDP is not correlated with this behavior, suggesting that it is more a product of cultural practice than poverty. Policymakers looking to assure financial opportunity to women should perhaps be looking across all Muslim economies, rather than just the poorer ones.

In many countries of the study, the number of women who said they decided how money is spent was a minority. These countries do not track with those where women have little control over savings, nor do they track with GDP. Spousal control of household spending occurs most often in Egypt (53 percent) and Afghanistan (47 percent), followed by Saudi Arabia and Bangladesh, where spending is controlled by a spouse or other in 51 percent and 48 percent of cases, respectively. The data suggest that in such countries, simply giving women access to financial resources may not be sufficient. They must also be assured a role within the household in deciding how these resources are spent.