Making Women Matter

Women’s rights have been a hypervisible feature of the development of the modern state in the GCC. For example, women’s mobility and access to work in desegregated settings in Saudi Arabia are an important and highly publicized part of its recent economic and political reform efforts. In the UAE, the Gender Balance Council was established to design policies that support women’s empowerment in coordination with the OECD and UN. How do these top-down empowerment initiatives influence the day-to-day lives of women and men in the GCC? What kinds of femininities and masculinities are reshaped and negotiated in response to these programs? How do the practices and discourses of “state feminism” and “global competitiveness” simultaneously strengthen and obscure important aspects of gender equality?

 In Making Women Matter, we investigate how national level policies influence women’s career paths in the GCC. We explore how women’s entry into the labor market involves navigating a variety of discourses about gender, class, religion, ethnicity, citizenship, and other context specific intersectional identities. We also unpack how and why women’s employment became a feature of the state’s ability to signal modernity and competitiveness in the global arena.