Last year we had a (by Monkey Cage standards) vigorous debate about Michael Ross’ American Political Science Review article “Oil, Islam, and Women.” Ross argued that poor progress towards gender equality in the Middle East was caused not so much by the region’s Islamic traditions as by its preponderance of oil. The argument goes as follows. Oil tends to crowd out other exports, especially manufacturing. Manufacturing demands large numbers of low wage workers and has been the primary source for increased female non-farm labor participation in countries across the globe. Moreover, manual jobs in the extraction of natural resources are male-dominated. Increased female labor participation has in turn been the stepping stone for greater political representation and equal rights. Ross demonstrates that within the Middle East oil-poor countries (like Morocco and Tunisia) have relatively better records on gender equality than oil-rich countries. Outside the Middle East oil-poor countries also tend to do better in this regard.
It has not taken long for proponents of the cultural approach to respond. SSRN has two working papers that both apply multi-level modelling to World Values surveys to show that islam, not oil, correlates with variation in opinions about gender equality across countries. Attitudes towards gender equality, in turn, shape whether women achieve equal rights and leadership positions, such as elected office. (one paper is by Amy Alexander and Christian Welzel the other one comes from Harvard’s Pippa Norris ) .
I find it difficult to arbitrate between these findings without extensively looking at the data given all the usual difficulties with cross-country research. For example, opinion based studies are limited to the sample of countries in which a World Values Survey was held whereas labor force participation is avaliable for a wider range of countries. Nonetheless, this is a very interesting area of research that I am sure we will here more of.
ADDED 12/14: AK points out that Ross is confronted with several critics (including Norris) in the most recent issue of Politics and Gender.
Disclosure: Michael Ross and I are working on a project together.