Religiosity and Muslim Women’s Employment in the United States

Abstract

Whether Muslim religiosity deters women's paid work is part of a broader question about the relationship between Islam and gender inequality. Muslim women's outcomes continue to be a subject of both scholarly and public debates, with the role of Islam hotly contested. Surveying the status of Muslim women around the world, several social scientists claim that Islam is inherently prone to curbing women's engagement in the public sphere, including but not limited to employment (Clark, Ramsbey, and Adler 1991; Fish 2011; Inglehart and Norris 2003; Tzannatos 1999). Most famously, Inglehart and Norris claim that "an Islamic religious heritage is one of the most powerful barriers to the rising tide of gender equality" (2003:49). Others say the relationship between the prevalence of Islam and diminished women's outcomes is spurious, better explained by other social conditions common to Muslim societies such as underdevelopment, the prevalence of oil in the economy or the dominance of Arab culture, whose patriarchy preceded Islam (Bayanpourtehrani and Sylwester 2013; Read 2004b; Ross 2008). Many qualitative scholars also point to the complex and often agentic ways in which women use religion in their communities

How Does the Religion Influence the Employee Engagement in Indonesian Context?

“…Without being in doubt with spirituality, Roof (2015) explained that religiosity has a significant association with engagement, vigor, and dedication. Practicing religion also have been evidently found, not deterring engagement in work (Abdelhadi, 2017).…”

Monitoring report on integration 2020

“…Some scholars have posited a negative relationship between Islam and the position of women in society (Korotayev et al, 2015). However, the exact causal mechanism behind the relationship is still debated, and evidence of lower labour market participation among Muslim women in Western countries is weaker (Abdelhadi, 2017). Here we take a first step in investigating the issue in Ireland by disaggregating rates of homemaking and employment by gender and religion.…”

Muslim women in the Canadian labor market: Between ethnic exclusion and religious discrimination

“…see Dagkas and Benn 2006, Read 2004, Spierings 2014, Spierings 2016, Talbani 1996. While this is a plausible explanation, a number of studies, including very recent ones, have questioned and eventually dismissed it (Abdelhadi 2017, Abdelhadi and England 2018, Khattab, Johnston and Manley 2017. We would argue that the high rate of economic inactivity among Muslim women in Canada should be explained in terms of the relationship between economic inactivity and the very high unemployment rate experienced by this group.…”