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Multiple dimensions influencing women's status in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region – factoring in socio-demographic, economic, and political forces are discussed in this paper. Process of modernization has been complicated by a strong patriarchal culture, the overlap of religion and government, and the absence of a diversified economy along with presence of wealth producing oil resources. Religious ideology, cultural beliefs, and traditional principles, however, cannot be argued as the only reason for women's status lagging behind in these countries. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Six diverse MENA countries – Iran, Libya, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen – that differ from one another with respect to geography, economy, demographics, modernization characteristics and cultural history are examined for comparative reasons.

Even though Islam is commonly portrayed as the main factor controlling women's lives and opportunities in MENA, the analysis shows that there are other significant processes at work. To date, women's higher level of educational attainment and unusually swift fertility decline in the MENA region deviates from the expectation that predicts a strong positive correlation between these demographic factors and increased women's social status and higher social mobility.

This conceptual paper demystifies the connection between women's social status and empowerment in the MENA region and its connection to economic development, employment opportunities, and political stability.

Nigeria presents something of an entrepreneurial paradox. Women in entrepreneurship dominate the economy, yet patriarchal structures dominate society. This article investigates how patriarchal factors impact entrepreneurial processes, in turn, creating unequal expectations of entrepreneurial opportunity.

The study adopts an intersectionality lens to explore how patriarchy is manifest for entrepreneurs. The reflective narratives of 30 entrepreneurs are analysed, provided through semi-structured interviews. An inductive qualitative approach accesses the gendered discourse of entrepreneurship as constructed by entrepreneurs. Within this discourse, the factors of patriarchy are exposed.

Findings reveal a multi-faceted patriarchy, with the informing factors of entrepreneurial gender roles, class and religion. The study explains how the interaction of these factors reinforce patriarchal ideals and create a variety of gendered images of what is acceptable entrepreneurial activity in Nigeria, and for whom.

This study contributes to growing insight on entrepreneurship in Africa and challenges linear arguments of entrepreneurship-as-emancipation for women. In complex and multidimensional contexts, entrepreneurs must navigate the intersection of factors sensitively, ensuring acceptance and fulfilment of societal expectations. The power of intersectionality as a theory of contextualisation is discussed.

Given the limiting gender role conditions arising from the prevalence of patriarchy in Nigeria and the shift to workers staying at home due to the deadly spread of coronavirus (COVID-19), this article aims to explore the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the work–life balance of professional mothers using the work–home resources model as a conceptual lens.

The qualitative data is based on telephone interviews with 28 married female university academics with children.

The findings reveal that the confinement policies enforced due to the need to combat the spread of COVID-19 and patriarchal norms deeply embedded in the Nigerian culture have exacerbated stress amongst women, who have needed to perform significantly more housework and childcare demands alongside working remotely than they did prior to the pandemic. The thematic analysis showed a loss of personal resources (e.g. time, energy, and income) resulting in career stagnation, health concerns, and increased male chauvinism due to the abrupt and drastic changes shaping the “new normal” lifestyle.

The study relies on a limited qualitative sample size, which makes the generalisation of findings difficult. However, the study contributes to the emerging global discourse on the profound negative consequences of COVID-19 on the lives and livelihoods of millions, with a focus on the stress and work–family challenges confronting women in a society that is not particularly egalitarian – unlike Western cultures.

The article provides valuable insights on how the COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically affected professional working mothers in the sub-Saharan African context, where literature is scarce.

This chapter provides a critical focus on the relationship between masculinities and widespread forms of interpersonal violence. The chapter begins by discussing the contribution of second wave feminist criminology in securing disciplinary attention to the study of gender and its relation to crime, and how the growth and maturation of theory and research on specific masculinities and crime followed logically from this feminist work. As part of this development, examination of masculine perpetrated violence initially commenced with Messerschmidt’s (1993) influential account of masculinities and crime in his book of the same name, and was further expanded through a range of historical and contemporary criminological studies on masculinities and interpersonal violence. The authors discuss the origins and history of critical masculinities theory, its relation to social understandings of interpersonal violence, and how these have shaped criminological research interest and findings. Masculinities are linked intricately with struggles for social power that occur between men and women and among different men, but they vary and intersect importantly with other dimensions of inequality. The authors utilise this conception of masculinities to discuss research on various forms of interpersonal violence, from men’s physical and sexual violence against girls and women, attacks on sexual minorities, violence between/among boys and men, and to the ambiguities of gender, sexualities, and violence by girls, women and men.

This paper aims to present a meta‐analysis of available statistical data and literature for gender‐related practices concerning women in business and education across countries, comparing the patriarchal belt and South Asian countries in the belt to the rest of the world. The purpose of the project is to investigate the progress of enhancement of opportunities for women to engage in non‐agricultural work in the belt, and, as women’s participation in tertiary education is touted as an impetus in enhancing women’s opportunities, investigate its effect.

The existence of a belt of countries from North Africa through Bangladesh and rural China is well known, with societies demonstrating a consistent pattern of restriction and suppression of women. No development of theory treating the patriarchal belt as a whole has been published. The authors earmark this as a future endeavour. They employ ten years of statistical summaries of percent of women in the non‐agricultural labour force and ratios of women to men in tertiary education provided by the United Nations in support of the UN Millennium Development Goals to compare changes in these activities in countries in the patriarchal belt, South Asia, and the rest of the world. The method is to carry out statistical comparisons of trends derived from annual averages for the two measures.

The literature review indicates that for millennia in the patriarchal belt societal practices have institutionalised women’s lack of access to participation in the labour market and generally from participating in much of public life. The analyses indicate that participation in non‐agricultural employment has decreased over the past decade in the belt compared to the rest of the world. Opportunities for women to participate in tertiary education have on average been increasing during this period for most countries of the world including those in the patriarchal belt. However, this circumstance has not led to increased participation in the non‐agricultural work force.

The practical implications seen are that the UN Millennium Development Goals (UNMDG) are important to improving the lot of individuals, some goals that purport to lead to improvements in human and gender rights in regions such as the patriarchal belt may have no real effect, and other, more useful goals need to be investigated. Economically, the exclusion of women from voluntary productive labour as detrimental to the development of a nation is seen.

In the patriarchal belt societal practices institutionalise negative discrimination concerning women, often codified in laws that prohibit women from participating in much of public life or fully competing in the labour market. The evaluation of these conditions using European and North American standards proposes that these women are abused and denied their rights. Nonetheless, initiatives such as agreements on the UNMDG appear to have no effect, and other solutions need to be pursued.

The originality and value of this paper is that it investigates the complete set of patriarchal belt countries, across countries that include both Muslim and Hindu majorities. It concludes that while religions tenets are employed to justify patriarchal practices, long‐standing tribal practices appear to be far more influential.

The relationship between women and land is not a mere legal or technical relationship but one that is mediated through socio-cultural norms and notions. Building on the work of Feminism Environmentalism, but moving beyond Agarwal’s materialist system, this paper aims to assess the level of change (if any) in the perceptions and practices of rural communities in Sohag and Assiut toward women’s ownership and inheritance of land post the implementation of some societal initiatives by feminist organizations and what this means for rural development in these communities. In doing this, the paper explores the strengths and weaknesses of these societal initiatives.

The paper uses case study approach by focusing on societal initiatives in two Egyptian Governorates. It also follows a mixed-methods sequential explanatory design, whereby quantitative data is first driven by using a survey that assesses the level of change in the societal perceptions and practices toward women’s ownership of agricultural land and its implication for rural development. Quantitative data is then followed by qualitative methods, namely, eight focus group discussions with different societal groups, to have a more in-depth understanding and explanation of the occurring change (if any).

The research finds that a positive shift occurred in the societal perceptions and practices with regard to women’s ownership and inheritance of agricultural land as a result of the societal initiatives. This, in turn, had better implications for rural development in terms of improved socio-economic well-being and overall quality of life. This improvement can be traced back to the change in cultural notions and perceptions as a result of four factors: capitalizing on the roles of influential groups, relying on influential activities, targeting men, especially heads of households or elders, and building blocks or partnering with the various relevant entities.

The misperception of the nature of the women-–environment/land relationship and its confinement to legal solutions undermines the likelihood of improving this relationship and, subsequently, attainment of rural and sustainable development. This study provides some key lessons to improve the women–environment/land relationship and, in turn, enhance the chances for rural and sustainable development through addressing the underlying socio-cultural barriers.

In Egypt, socio-cultural barriers hamper women’s ownership of agricultural land leading to only 5% of agriculture land being owned by women compared to 95% owned by men; a situation that is found in many other countries, such as Kenya, where women perform 70% of the agricultural labor, but possess less than 1% of the agricultural land. Improving women’s access to land, hence, solves a common social problem in Egypt and Africa and enhances gender equality.

Little work has been done to investigate the socio-cultural dimensions to the women–environment relationship. Hence, this study fills this gap and concludes with some lessons learned on how to improve the women–environment, particularly land, relationship.

The concept of patriarchy, one of the key thinking tools of the 1970s women’s movements, has been used and critiqued in many current and historical projects. This chapter enters the debate in an unorthodox way. Rather than define, defend, or critique the concept of patriarchy, it focuses on its capacity to articulate historically specific forms of relations between gender and generation.

The body of the chapter notes the continuities and differences in the way mastery and social infancy were connected in several episodes of thinking with patriarchy in Western social and political thought. Attempts to bring Roman law into a coherent system in early sixth-century ce, debates between defenders of absolutist rule and proponents of democracy in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, nineteenth-century reconstructions of human pre-history and resurgent twentieth-century women’s movements have all left traces in ways of thinking about gender and generational relations today.

In the last two decades, new forms of activism and scholarship drew on the conceptual toolkit surrounding patriarchy. The last section of the chapter highlights two of these areas: research on child rights governance and the total social organization of labor, and writings on patrimonialism. Key insights from this work, the chapter concludes, can be used to argue that a focus on historically specific forms of the interface between gender and generation constitutes a useful aspect of thinking with patriarchy.

It is arguable that the central questions requiring explanation by the behavioural and social sciences are those falling under the rubric “nature vs. nurture”. To be sure, the issue is oversimplified when stated so simply; there are both physiological and environmental elements in the causation of behaviour, as well as feedback through which each alters the other. Moreover, discussions of this dichotomy can often be seen to be sterile arguments about definition, rather than answers to the empirical question of what is, in fact, happening. What matters is not “nature” or “nurture” in the abstract, but the roles physiology, environment, and the interaction of the two play in generating specific behaviour.

By conceptualising patriarchy in the workplace as a social situation, the purpose of this paper is to examine the prevalence of patriarchal attitudes and their impact on women’s workplace behaviour among Nigerian organisations.

The study uses a qualitative research approach, drawing on data from 32 semi-structured interviews with female employees and managers in two high-street banks in Nigeria.

The study finds that patriarchy shapes women’s behaviour in ways that undermine their performance and organisational citizenship behaviour (OCB). Furthermore, the study finds that patriarchal attitudes, often practised at home, are frequently transferred to organisational settings. This transference affects women’s workplace behaviour and maintains men’s (self-perceived) superior status quo, whereby women are dominated, discriminated against and permanently placed in inferior positions.

The extent to which the findings of this research can be generalised is constrained by the limited sample and scope of the research.

The challenges posed by the strong patriarchy on women’s workplace behaviour are real and complex, and organisations must address them in order to create a fairer workplace in which employees can thrive. It is therefore essential for organisations to examine periodically their culture to ensure that all employees, regardless of gender, are involved in the organisation’s affairs. Furthermore, organisations need to help women become more proactive in combating patriarchal behaviour, which often affects their performance and OCB. This requires organisations to affirm consistently their equal opportunities, equal rights and equal treatment policies. It is essential that organisations take this problem seriously by attaching due penalty to gender discrimination, as this will go a long way in ensuring positive outcomes for women and providing a fairer workplace.

This study provides empirical evidence that a more egalitarian work environment (in Nigerian banking) will result in improved performance from female employees and organisations. It calls for greater policy and organisational interventions to create a more inclusive work environment and an equal society.

This chapter examines how gender interacts with informal workers’ collective action strategies in the context of contemporary development scripts around economic growth. Specifically, it engages the theoretical debates on the relationship between patriarchy and capitalism as the systems of domination that organize gender and class. Drawing from a comparative analysis of informal workers’ movements in India’s domestic work and construction sectors, I find the relationship between gender and class and between patriarchy and capitalism is being reconceptualized from below and differs by occupational structures and organization histories. For domestic workers, movements assert what I call a “unitary” model of exploitation. Because domestic workers’ organizations entered the productive sphere through a focus on social reproduction, their struggles conflate gender and class to reverse the shame attached to domestic work and increase the recognized worth of women’s labor. Because construction workers’ organizations mobilize male and female workers and began as class-based organizations focusing on productive work, they articulate what I term “a dual systems” approach to patriarchy and capitalism that exposes inequalities between men and women within the sector, such as unequal pay, glass ceilings, and issues of embodiment. In both cases, global development scripts have not only shaped movement approaches, but also enabled movements to articulate gendered labor subjects in innovative ways. While domestic workers’ unitary model has had more success in increasing women workers’ dignity and leadership, construction workers’ dualist model has attained more successes in attaining material benefits in the reproductive sphere. These findings suggest that debates on unitary versus dual-systems models of exploitation present a false dichotomy and veil the reality that both are necessary for feminist theory, development models, and women workers’ struggles on the ground.