Women, Work, and Economic Reform in the Middle East

Abstract

This book has been several years in the making, but concerted work on it began in 1994, when I was a senior researcher at the World Institute for Development Economics Research (WIDER), a research and training center of the United Nations University (UNU) in Helsinki, Finland. In 1994 and 1995 I traveled through extensive interviews with officials of government agencies, donor agencies, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs); with business owners and enterprise managers;with women workers and professionals;and with economists, sociologists, and legal experts, from whom I also obtained articles and documents. I conducted interviews and observations during visits to factories, businesses, and other workplaces. In addition to gathering secondary sources published in the countries I visited, I obtained official publications to supplement the international statistical sources I used. I had employed a similar research methodology during visits to Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia in the...