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Amalia Saar
To cite this article: Amalia Saar (2017) The Gender Contract under Neoliberalism:
Palestinian-Israeli Women's Labor Force Participation, Feminist Economics, 23:1, 54-76, DOI:
10.1080/13545701.2016.1190028
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Amalia Saar
ABSTRACT
This paper interprets the pressure to raise Palestinian-Israeli womens labor
force participation within the unfolding neoliberal project in Israel, arguing
that womens stalled workforce integration reflects embedded economic
rationality. Poor infrastructure and discriminatory policies, combined
with Israels rapid economic privatization, set contradictory expectations
for Palestinian-Israeli women: their opportunity-cost calculations include
entitlements to economic protection alongside obligations to provide
expenditure-saving domestic labor. Yet growing pressure and desire to join the
paid workforce suggest that the gender contract may be changing. This cultural
schema, which links womens economic strategizing to their sense of feminine
propriety, is transforming as part of a broader transition to a market-led gender
regime, with the paradoxical effect of encouraging womens employment while
simultaneously impoverishing them. By dwelling on the dialectics of culture
and the structure of work opportunities, and womens agency, this paper
aims to resolves an impasse in the current debate on womens low workforce
participation.
KEYWORDS
Anthropology, culture, feminist theory, gender contract, womens labor force
participation, Palestinian-Israeli women
JEL-code: Z1
INTRODUCTION
This paper addresses the enigma of the low labor force participation
(LFP) of Palestinian women citizens of Israel, a perplexing phenomenon
considering the high gross domestic product and overall economic
development of Israel, and the incomparably higher employment rates of
Jewish-Israeli women. Over the past decade or so, this circumstance has
sparked an intensifying and increasingly polarized debate. Some analysts
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THE GENDER CONTRACT UNDER NEOLIBERALISM
and politicians argue that Arab women want to work; its their society that
prevents them,1 while critical scholars and activists assert that the roots
of the problem are political and structural: discriminatory policies, job
scarcity in the Palestinian regions, blocked opportunities in the national
economy, insufficient daycare facilities, or poor public transportation.
Culture, they characteristically add, has nothing to do with it. This paper
shares much of this criticism, but seeks to advance it theoretically. I take
issue with the initial grammar of the debate that pits structural against
cultural explanations, and argue that the simplistic either/or positioning
of these two components can be overcome by a tighter integration of up-
to-date gender and culture theory. Among other things, such integration
paves the way to a non-culturist cultural analysis. I seek to overcome the
dichotomy of culture versus structure of opportunities by looking at the
ways they mutually inform, and by bringing human agency back into the
equation. I draw on the legacies of feminist economics and practice theory
in anthropology, and focus on the cultural schema of the gender contract.
This schema sustains the entanglement of culture and structure by shaping
both the gendered division of labor and the institutional evaluations of
gendered work, while providing a script with which actors may maneuver
dynamic situations.
I make two interconnected arguments: first, I contend that, at the
present historical moment, the low LFP of Palestinian-Israeli women is a
direct corollary of the unfolding neoliberal project, and the concomitant
transformations in the gender regime. After decades-long policies that
restricted their economic opportunities by limiting their integration
into the national workforce while also blocking the development of an
autonomous ethnic enclave, the state now actively supports development
through the market for its Palestinian citizens. This shift has coalesced
with a rapid transition in the gender regime the institutional forms of
production, reproduction, identities, and entitlements from a domestic-
centered to a market-led type. Throughout most of the twentieth century,
the gender regime among the Palestinian citizens remained predominantly
domestic centered despite the 1948 shift from subsistence to cash economy.
Although Palestinian citizens had lost the bulk of their agricultural lands
and became commuter proletariats, they continued to reside in villages and
to use domestic production as an important supplementary component of
household economy. This is now changing with economic liberalization
and the spread of neoliberal influences. As the market becomes an
all-encompassing presence, at once overtaking home economics and
pervading the language of personal accomplishments and moral virtue
albeit without eliminating the long-standing economic effects of ethno-
national exclusion women are developing ambivalent attitudes with
respect to employment. They increasingly want to become employed, but
still refrain from attempting to do so in large numbers.
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inadequate infrastructure and overall planning has left the process largely
stalled.
The workforce participation of Palestinian-Israeli women is estimated at
about 26.3 percent (Israel CBS 2014).3 This exceedingly low rate, as against
an estimated 64.7 percent of Jewish-Israeli women (Israel CBS 2014), is
effectively even lower, considering that Christians, who comprise only 9
percent of the local Palestinian population, represent about one-third of all
employed Palestinian women, with an LFP rate of 47.9 percent, compared
to 22.9 percent among Muslim women (Israel CBS 2014); and that the
LFP of Bedouin women is merely 3 percent, and their average wage is
half of the average wage of women employees in Israel.4 Employed women
tend to concentrate in the Palestinian ethnic enclave, where they may find
employment in the public sector (social services, the Arab educational
system, the local municipalities) or with private employers (Nabil Khattab
2002). Outside this sector, they can be employed in one of several ways. At
one end are menial jobs in agriculture, textiles, or cleaning, where the pay is
extremely low and does not include sick days, vacation, and pension (Asma
Agbarieh Zahalka and Michal Schwartz 2008; Amalia Saar 2016). Further
along the job continuum, professional women (and men) are employed in
hospitals and pharmaceutical firms, while less skilled women can find jobs
in customer-service call centers and in retail (Erez A. Marantz, Alexandra
Kalev, and Noah Lewin-Epstein 2013), areas where they come in direct
contact with a mixed Arabic- and Hebrew-speaking clientele.
For women, employment in the Palestinian enclave has complex
implications. For many, the possibility to work close to home is crucial,
considering the pressures to be home for the children. Another
important advantage is that working in an Arabic-speaking environment
they do not need to speak fluent Hebrew and are presumably shielded
from racist treatment, particularly if they are veiled. However, employment
in the Palestinian private sector has some clear disadvantages. As several
reports now confirm (Zahalka and Schwartz 2008; Kayan 2014), and my
own ethnographic data reaffirm, women in this labor market are subject
to low pay lower than the legal minimum wage, educational mismatch,
involuntary part-time employment, and generally weak enforcement of
protective labor laws. In addition to the unwelcoming air in the Jewish-
dominated economy,5 women are tied to their communities by poor public
transportation (Wafa Elias, Tomer Toledo, and Yoram Shiftan 2010) and
insufficient childcare facilities that would allow them to be absent for
longer hours.
not least, these arguments fail to problematize the Orientalist logic that has
coupled racialized womens employment with culture in the first place.
Whatever the position in the culturestructure debate, the weak level of
culture theory in the different studies published to date resonates with what
Eiman O. Zein-Elabdin (2004) has called the double erasure of culture in
economics: first by a deep-rooted perception that modern Europeans are
ontologically superior to all other cultures, and second by the presumption
within economics that the economic itself the materiality of life, habits
of provisioning or accumulation is extracultural. Focusing on practice,
where cultural norms are enacted and continuously adapted, avoids erasing
or reifying culture and brings us to the schema of the patriarchal gender
contract and the gender regime within.
dynamic and amenable to negotiation and interpretation. But for all this
dynamism and variability, the underlying schema still exerts a powerful
effect on employment contracts, wages, and labor regulations, as well as on
womens and mens subjective sense of entitlement, gender propriety, and
employment ambitions (Khawla Abu Baker 2002; Sajeda Amin and Nagah
H. Al-Bassusi 2004; Amalia Saar 2009).
In the professional literature, the notion of a gender contract that
dictates the respective responsibilities to care, protect, and provide has
been discussed primarily through its legal and normative repercussions.
Particular emphases are commonly placed on the role of the state and
the religious establishment, and on the division of authority between
these entities and (male-dominated) families (Olmsted 2005a, 2005b; Heidi
Gottfried 2013). But no less important to consider is the way the gender
contract operates as a cultural schema. A close exploration of this aspect
of the contract allows us to trace the links between peoples ideas about
the proper ways of being women or men and the ways they strategize in
concrete, dynamic situations, calculate the value of their capital, and weigh
the costs of their employment opportunities.
gap between this vision and reality leads to ambivalence over the idea
of employment. The reality is that jobs perceived as right for women
part-time, close-to-home, clerical jobs are rare and poorly paid.
Women, particularly those employed in the Palestinian private sector,
report precarious employment, including salaries lower than the sum
written on their pay slips, harassment, overtime without pay, and arbitrary
redundancies (Amalia Saar 2011; Kayan 2014). So despite their hopes,
Israeli-Palestinian women remain hesitant to make paid employment a
more central component of femininity.
Even if you go all the way to Mars you are still a woman, and at the
end of the day you belong in your home, with your children. They are
your responsibility, not your husbands. Someone who works until 1 or
2 p.m. can find the time to get back home and sit with her children
(supervise their homework). But if you work in the legal system you
come home with files that you need to go over, and this comes at the
expense of your son.
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The main obstacle that women face (when they become employed)
is mental: to know that you have a family and children and you are
leaving them behind. Personally, when I stay late for meetings and get
home, say, at 6 p.m., the pressure is not just to see to it that someone
picks them up from school and feeds them, and not even that my
husband will give me a long face. The most difficult thing is when my
mother calls and says: How could you leave them like that? This, I
think, is the most difficult thing that none of the studies has addressed.
Because then all the values that you were brought up with are dropped.
You are not fulfilling them: to be the good, caring mother, the hand
that rocks the cradle. [You betray] all those things that have been
inculcated in you.
I got pregnant with my second child when my first one was six months
old, and decided to stay home with them until they went to school. I
wanted to dedicate myself to my children. My mistake was that I did not
follow developments outside the home. In those six years, there were
huge developments with computers. People started using the Internet,
Facebook . . . I heard about it, but did not experiment with it directly
because I thought I didnt need it.
Now that her sons have started school, she faces several impediments
in her attempts to get a job. Since her husband, a chemical engineer
working in Tel Aviv, leaves home daily at 5 a.m. and returns at 9 p.m.,
she confines her search to a 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. job to accommodate her
childrens school time. She wants to work as a secretary, but a years
searching has not yet yielded a suitable job. She also testifies that the
years spent outside the job market made her lose her confidence, and
is aware that she needs further training. Haneen wants to find a job in
order to help her husband financially. But more than that, she wants
to get out of the house. This, she says, will help her children become
more independent and make her more open to life. Her husband does
not object, but the main difficulty is finding a part-time job close to
home.
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THE GENDER CONTRACT UNDER NEOLIBERALISM
Amalia Saar
University of Haifa, Department of Anthropology
Mount Carmel, Haifa 31905, Israel
e-mail: saaramalia@gmail.com
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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTOR
Amalia Saar is a cultural anthropologist. She is Senior Lecturer and Head
of the Anthropology Department (in the making) at the University of
Haifa. She has done research with Palestinian citizens of Israel, focusing
on gender constructions and politics, and with low-income women in
Israel who enroll in economic empowerment schemes. Her fields of
expertise include feminist theory, urban anthropology, action research,
and generational relations in the feminist movement. Her 2016 book is
titled Economic Citizenship: Neoliberal Paradoxes of Empowerment (Berghahn
Books).
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Research was made possible thanks to the generous support of the Israel
Science Foundation, research grant No. 1094/08, and a philanthropic
fund that wishes to remain anonymous. I thank research assistant Noor
Fallah for her valuable insights, al-Tufula Center and particularly Nabila
Espanioly for granting me access to the project, and the interviewees who
trusted us with their stories. All personal information that would allow the
identification of any person or person(s) described in the article has been
removed.
NOTES
1 Calcalist (economic daily), April 4, 2012.
2 I have chosen the title Israeli Palestinian, which admittedly may sound offensive to
Jews and Arabs alike, because it reflects the dual components of their inclusion and
exclusion with respect to the state. For a more elaborate discussion of identity politics
among the Palestinians inside Israel, see Saar (2007); Amalia Saar and Taghreed
Yahya-Younis (2008).
3 This review does not include Palestinian women in the West Bank and Gaza Strip,
whose LFP is generally much lower and more precarious still. For initial reference, see
Samira Haj (1992); Jennifer C. Olmsted (1996); Ray L. Huntington, Camille Fronk,
and Bruce A. Chadwick (2001).
4 Center for Bedouin Studies and Development, Annual Statistical Review (2004),
cmsprod.bgu.ac.il/Centers/bedouin/statistic_yearbook/chapter4.htm.
5 For example, in the government sector, which is the biggest employer of women in
Israel, Palestinian citizens constitute only 5.5 percent of employees in government
ministries and their subsidiaries (excluding the Ministry of Education), and only a
third of these are women (Aziz Haidar 2005).
6 The choice of terminology here is hardly coincidental. Typically, members of the
Israeli establishment and mainstream academics use the title Arab, whereas critical
scholars and activists opt for Palestinian.
7 Personal interview with the head of the Authority for Economic Development in the
Arab, Druze, and Circassian Sector at the Prime Ministers Office, July 2012.
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