Women\u27s Rights in the Middle East and The Arab Spring

It is widely believed that women in the Middle East suffer more discrimination than their counterparts in the rest of the world, and that the “Arab Spring” has either failed to increase their rights or even exposed them to new threats. We will first examine how social scientists measure women’s empowerment and how Middle Eastern women fare on these measurements. Then we will analyze the ways in which expanded space for citizen activism, and increased media freedoms, have significantly increased some forms of women’s rights in post- Mubarak Egypt