DOI: 10.1017/S0003055408080040 Oil, Islam, and Women

Women have made less progress toward gender equality in the Middle East than in any otherregion. Many observers claim this is due to the region’s Islamic traditions. I suggest that oil,not Islam, is at fault; and that oil production also explains why women lag behind in many other countries. Oil production reduces the number of women in the labor force, which in turn reduces their political influence. As a result, oil-producing states are left with atypically strong patriarchal norms, laws, and political institutions. I support this argument with global data on oil production, female work patterns, and female political representation, and by comparing oil-rich Algeria to oil-poor Morocco and Tunisia. This argument has implications for the study of the Middle East, Islamic culture, and the resource curse. In the Middle East, fewer women work outside thehome, and fewer hold positions in government,than in any other region of the world. According to most observers, this troubling anomaly is due to the region’s Islamic traditions (e.g., Sharabi 1988; World Bank 2004). Some even argue that the “clash of civi-lizations ” between the Islamic world and the West has been caused, in part, by the poor treatment of Muslim women (Inglehart and Norris 2003a; Landes and Landes 2001). This paper suggests that women in the Middle East are underrepresented in the workforce and in gov-ernment because of oil—–not Islam. Oil and mineral production can also explain the unusually low status of women in many countries outside the Middle East