Gender, religion and multiculturalism: Muslim/non-Muslim differentials in Australia's labour market

The association between gender and Islam has been observed as both 'fascinating' and 'complex'. Despite the existence of a substantial consensus between scholars in relation to the inferior settings of Muslim women with the world standard, the approaches explaining the settings are completely different and sometimes contradictory. On one hand, women's setting in Islamic societies is linked to the religion per se. On the other hand, the status of Muslim women is explained by using determinants other than religion at which it is essential to distinguish the true religion from what is interpreted and performed in the name of Islam in different contexts. This paper is an empirical investigation highlighting the differentials between Australian Muslim and non-Muslim women in the labour market. This empirical investigation provides an opportunity for the distinction mentioned above because it focuses on Australia's multicultural and multiethnic setting where its approximately 82000 Muslim women aged 15-54 came from the four corners of the world along with a wide range of socio-cultural background and experience. The paper relies on the special tabulations of the 2001 full census data dealing with almost 5.4 million women aged 15-54. More importantly, using logistic regression analysis enables us to examine the influence of Islamic identity when other competing determinants such as human capital, family formation, and migration aspects are controlled