Feminist Economics

ISSN: 1354-5701 (Print) 1466-4372 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfec20

The Gender Contract under Neoliberalism:

Palestinian-Israeli Women's Labor Force
Participation

Amalia Saar

To cite this article: Amalia Saar (2017) The Gender Contract under Neoliberalism:
Palestinian-Israeli Women's Labor Force Participation, Feminist Economics, 23:1, 54-76, DOI:
10.1080/13545701.2016.1190028

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13545701.2016.1190028

Published online: 20 Jun 2016.

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Feminist Economics, 2017
Vol. 23, No. 1, 5476, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13545701.2016.1190028

THE GENDER CONTRACT UNDER NEOLIBERALISM:

PALESTINIAN-ISRAELI WOMENS LABOR FORCE
PARTICIPATION

Amalia Saar

ABSTRACT
This paper interprets the pressure to raise Palestinian-Israeli womens labor
force participation within the unfolding neoliberal project in Israel, arguing
that womens stalled workforce integration reflects embedded economic
rationality. Poor infrastructure and discriminatory policies, combined
with Israels rapid economic privatization, set contradictory expectations
for Palestinian-Israeli women: their opportunity-cost calculations include
entitlements to economic protection alongside obligations to provide
expenditure-saving domestic labor. Yet growing pressure and desire to join the
paid workforce suggest that the gender contract may be changing. This cultural
schema, which links womens economic strategizing to their sense of feminine
propriety, is transforming as part of a broader transition to a market-led gender
regime, with the paradoxical effect of encouraging womens employment while
simultaneously impoverishing them. By dwelling on the dialectics of culture
and the structure of work opportunities, and womens agency, this paper
aims to resolves an impasse in the current debate on womens low workforce
participation.
KEYWORDS
Anthropology, culture, feminist theory, gender contract, womens labor force
participation, Palestinian-Israeli women

JEL-code: Z1

INTRODUCTION
This paper addresses the enigma of the low labor force participation
(LFP) of Palestinian women citizens of Israel, a perplexing phenomenon
considering the high gross domestic product and overall economic
development of Israel, and the incomparably higher employment rates of
Jewish-Israeli women. Over the past decade or so, this circumstance has
sparked an intensifying and increasingly polarized debate. Some analysts

2016 IAFFE
 THE GENDER CONTRACT UNDER NEOLIBERALISM

and politicians argue that Arab women want to work; its their society that
prevents them,1 while critical scholars and activists assert that the roots
of the problem are political and structural: discriminatory policies, job
scarcity in the Palestinian regions, blocked opportunities in the national
economy, insufficient daycare facilities, or poor public transportation.
Culture, they characteristically add, has nothing to do with it. This paper
shares much of this criticism, but seeks to advance it theoretically. I take
issue with the initial grammar of the debate that pits structural against
cultural explanations, and argue that the simplistic either/or positioning
of these two components can be overcome by a tighter integration of up-
to-date gender and culture theory. Among other things, such integration
paves the way to a non-culturist cultural analysis. I seek to overcome the
dichotomy of culture versus structure of opportunities by looking at the
ways they mutually inform, and by bringing human agency back into the
equation. I draw on the legacies of feminist economics and practice theory
in anthropology, and focus on the cultural schema of the gender contract.
This schema sustains the entanglement of culture and structure by shaping
both the gendered division of labor and the institutional evaluations of
gendered work, while providing a script with which actors may maneuver
dynamic situations.
I make two interconnected arguments: first, I contend that, at the
present historical moment, the low LFP of Palestinian-Israeli women is a
direct corollary of the unfolding neoliberal project, and the concomitant
transformations in the gender regime. After decades-long policies that
restricted their economic opportunities by limiting their integration
into the national workforce while also blocking the development of an
autonomous ethnic enclave, the state now actively supports development
through the market for its Palestinian citizens. This shift has coalesced
with a rapid transition in the gender regime the institutional forms of
production, reproduction, identities, and entitlements from a domestic-
centered to a market-led type. Throughout most of the twentieth century,
the gender regime among the Palestinian citizens remained predominantly
domestic centered despite the 1948 shift from subsistence to cash economy.
Although Palestinian citizens had lost the bulk of their agricultural lands
and became commuter proletariats, they continued to reside in villages and
to use domestic production as an important supplementary component of
household economy. This is now changing with economic liberalization
and the spread of neoliberal influences. As the market becomes an
all-encompassing presence, at once overtaking home economics and
pervading the language of personal accomplishments and moral virtue
albeit without eliminating the long-standing economic effects of ethno-
national exclusion women are developing ambivalent attitudes with
respect to employment. They increasingly want to become employed, but
still refrain from attempting to do so in large numbers.
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 ARTICLE

My second argument is theoretical. I contend that culture and

the structure of work opportunities are intertwined. The structure of
opportunities comprises objectified forms of capital, strategies, and
identities, which are in turn formed in a continuous process of practice
made meaningful in a given historical context. Cultural schemas such as
the gender contract provide the mental frameworks for this process.
My aim is twofold: by using the conceptual framework of feminist
economics, I hope to show the economic rationality behind the occupational
abstinence of women who opt to make the most of limited economic
opportunities. This part of my argument clearly joins the structural
discrimination perspective in the above debate, but without the essentialist
implications for culture. By exploring the role of the gender contract in
guiding womens work strategies and determining works value, and by
bringing it to bear on the structureculture debate, I hope to show that
culture is deeply relevant to Palestinian-Israeli womens LFP, not because
of any essential attribute of Arab culture but because it forms the very basis
of the structure of work opportunities.

THE ENIGMA OF PALESTINIAN-ISRAELI WOMENS LOW

LFP
Palestinians who are Israeli citizens are estimated to number about
1,723,000, or 20 percent of the total population of the state. This group
includes several religious categories: Muslims (82 percent), Christians (9
percent), and Druzes (8 percent; Israel Central Bureau of Statistics [CBS]
2014), and further subcultural categories (rural, urban, and Bedouins),
who nevertheless share important characteristics, most notably language
and, for the most part, national identification.2 As citizens they are entitled
to some important measures of state protection, social benefits, and
civil rights, yet they suffer from multiple forms of discrimination and
marginalization (David Kretzmer 1990). They also fare consistently poorly
in health, economic well-being, educational attainments, poverty rates, and
other social indicators (Ramsees Gharrah 2011).
The Palestinian regions inside Israel are grossly underdeveloped
compared with the Jewish-populated regions. Massive confiscation of lands
following the establishment of the state changed the Palestinians who
remained from subsistence agriculturalists to proletarians (Shulamit Carmi
and Henry Rosenfeld 1992). The ethnically split character of the national
economy, however, blocked the full integration of those who became
citizens into the Jewish-dominated workforce and channeled the bulk of
employment opportunities to the Palestinian enclave (Nabil Khattab and
Sami Miaari 2013). The cessation of agriculture and the intensification
of economic activities in the small and rapidly crowding Palestinian
locales instigated the urbanization of these rural communities. However,
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 THE GENDER CONTRACT UNDER NEOLIBERALISM

inadequate infrastructure and overall planning has left the process largely
stalled.
The workforce participation of Palestinian-Israeli women is estimated at
about 26.3 percent (Israel CBS 2014).3 This exceedingly low rate, as against
an estimated 64.7 percent of Jewish-Israeli women (Israel CBS 2014), is
effectively even lower, considering that Christians, who comprise only 9
percent of the local Palestinian population, represent about one-third of all
employed Palestinian women, with an LFP rate of 47.9 percent, compared
to 22.9 percent among Muslim women (Israel CBS 2014); and that the
LFP of Bedouin women is merely 3 percent, and their average wage is
half of the average wage of women employees in Israel.4 Employed women
tend to concentrate in the Palestinian ethnic enclave, where they may find
employment in the public sector (social services, the Arab educational
system, the local municipalities) or with private employers (Nabil Khattab
2002). Outside this sector, they can be employed in one of several ways. At
one end are menial jobs in agriculture, textiles, or cleaning, where the pay is
extremely low and does not include sick days, vacation, and pension (Asma
Agbarieh Zahalka and Michal Schwartz 2008; Amalia Saar 2016). Further
along the job continuum, professional women (and men) are employed in
hospitals and pharmaceutical firms, while less skilled women can find jobs
in customer-service call centers and in retail (Erez A. Marantz, Alexandra
Kalev, and Noah Lewin-Epstein 2013), areas where they come in direct
contact with a mixed Arabic- and Hebrew-speaking clientele.
For women, employment in the Palestinian enclave has complex
implications. For many, the possibility to work close to home is crucial,
considering the pressures to be home for the children. Another
important advantage is that working in an Arabic-speaking environment
they do not need to speak fluent Hebrew and are presumably shielded
from racist treatment, particularly if they are veiled. However, employment
in the Palestinian private sector has some clear disadvantages. As several
reports now confirm (Zahalka and Schwartz 2008; Kayan 2014), and my
own ethnographic data reaffirm, women in this labor market are subject
to low pay lower than the legal minimum wage, educational mismatch,
involuntary part-time employment, and generally weak enforcement of
protective labor laws. In addition to the unwelcoming air in the Jewish-
dominated economy,5 women are tied to their communities by poor public
transportation (Wafa Elias, Tomer Toledo, and Yoram Shiftan 2010) and
insufficient childcare facilities that would allow them to be absent for
longer hours.

Culture or structure? The contours of a debate

Since the turn of the millennium, with the sharp neoliberal turn in
Israeli political economy (Dani Filc 2004; Saar 2016), the low LFP of
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Palestinian-Israeli women has become a matter of growing public concern,

releasing a deluge of research reports, academic articles, and opinion
pieces. Surveys and statistical analyses have been commissioned by state
ministries, the Bank of Israel, the Knesset, and some of the large Zionist
foundations; civil-society organizations have produced their own research
reports; social scientists have published academic articles; and politicians
have been making statements on the topic in the popular media, together
creating a discourse on what is generally agreed among the parties as the
problem of Palestinian/Arab womens low LFP.6
While the different participants in this discourse seem to agree that
womens low LFP is a problem (that is, that higher employment rates are
good for women), they disagree on the causes of the problem. Typically,
reports written for state institutions are premised on the idea that Arab
womens employment is very much affected by the traditional orientation
of the Arab Muslim society (Osnat Fichtelberg 2004: 3), which in turn
infuriates critical scholars and social-change activists, who opine that the
roots of the problem are first and foremost political and structural.
Incidentally, the chain-of-modernization paradigm that informs many of
these statistical reports echoes a widespread sentiment among the Israeli-
Jewish and Palestinian publics more generally (Rhoda Ann Kanaaneh 2002;
Aziza Khazzoom 2003). In fact, it is a major motif in the Israeli-Palestinian
discourse of racism. Critical scholars reaction to the essentialist usages of
culture or Islam in what purport to be objective reports on Palestinian
womens LFP is rooted in this background. It is also, of course, rooted in the
postcolonial feminist discourse more generally, where two distinct points
of criticism are commonly made: one relates to the Orientalist tendency of
modernist economists to implicate Arab women as a monolithic category
and as passive victims of their culture (Jennifer C. Olmsted 2004; Gamze
avdar and Yavuz Yasar 2014; Ebru Kongar, Jennifer C. Olmsted, and
Elora Shehabuddin 2014; Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Antonina Griecci
Woodsum, Himmat Zubi, and Rachel Busbridge 2014). The other takes
issue with postmodernists attempts to vindicate Arab culture by adopting
a cultural relativism that neglects to bring power into the analysis (S.
Charusheela 2004).
The double danger of essentializing Arab culture and Arab women and
depoliticizing the analysis has motivated scholars and social activists who
address Palestinian-Israeli womens LFP to attempt to disprove what they
dub cultural explanations by stressing internal diversity on the one hand,
and the weight of political-economic factors on the other. One typical
strategy of unpacking culture is to emphasize the gross disparities in
LFP among women from different religious subgroups, notably Christians,
Muslims, and Druzes (Khattab 2002; Judith King, Deniz Neon, Abraham
Wolde-Tsadick, and Jack Habib 2009; Yuval Yonay and Vered Kraus 2009),
and in one case, also Jews of Arab descent (Yuval Yonay and Vered
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 THE GENDER CONTRACT UNDER NEOLIBERALISM

Kraus 2014). A second prominent strategy focuses on local attitudes to

womens employment, education, and general participation in the public
sphere. Some of these studies provide opinion polls on these issues that
show increasing support for womens employment and a general consensus
that given more job opportunities and supportive facilities, women would
gladly join the workforce (Nabil Khattab 2003; King et al. 2009; Yousef
Jabareen 2010; Elias, Toledo, and Shiftan 2010; Suheir Abu Oksa Daoud
2012). Critical debaters on Palestinian-Israeli womens LFP, in other words,
attempt to curtail the explanatory weight of culture by reducing it to
religious identities or to levels of traditionalism measured by attitudes to
gender roles. While culture is not eliminated entirely from the equation,
its weight is extrapolated to be naturally diminishing; but this decrease is
presumably slowed down by state policies that aim to reinforce patriarchal
elements as part of its system of domination (Zahalka and Schwartz 2008).
Although I share the initial position that the low workforce participation
of Palestinian-Israeli women is a political-economic matter, I find that
such explanations draw on theoretically uninformed understandings of
both gender and culture. In a fashion characteristic of quantitative studies
in other subfields (Amalia Saar, Sarai Aharoni, and Dalia Sachs 2011),
these studies use gender as a synonym for women, take for granted
the identification of women and domestic labor, and ignore the nature
of gender as a mechanism of distinction that creates women and men
or domestic and public as mutually exclusive or mutually complementary
social categories. Similarly, they treat culture as a vague factor that
presumably dominates the domestic domain but diminishes in the public
domain, while neglecting its dynamic and politically contingent nature.
For example, the attempts to show that culture is not an impediment
because growing numbers of Palestinians now support womens
employment unwittingly fall into the double trap of reducing culture to
attitudes on gender propriety and of assuming that official work arenas are
culture free. Such presuppositions completely ignore the understandings,
now well established in feminist economics scholarship, that care work
and household production of nonmarket goods and services have direct
value for the domestic and market economy alike (Shirin J. A. Shukri
1996; Nancy Folbre 2004; Killian Mullan 2010). And they ignore the close
intertwining of public and domestic work spheres and the expectation that
women but not men will continue to work in the home even after
they become officially employed, conditions that have a decisive effect
on womens and mens respective opportunities, and concomitantly on
their opportunity/cost calculations. These deciding the value of work
and whether it is worth taking are determined by husbands and wives
combined earning capacities, themselves a corollary of the family-wage
doctrine, which is designed to allow a male wage earner to support a
nonemployed spouse and other dependents (Ellen Mutari 1999). Last but
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not least, these arguments fail to problematize the Orientalist logic that has
coupled racialized womens employment with culture in the first place.
Whatever the position in the culturestructure debate, the weak level of
culture theory in the different studies published to date resonates with what
Eiman O. Zein-Elabdin (2004) has called the double erasure of culture in
economics: first by a deep-rooted perception that modern Europeans are
ontologically superior to all other cultures, and second by the presumption
within economics that the economic itself the materiality of life, habits
of provisioning or accumulation is extracultural. Focusing on practice,
where cultural norms are enacted and continuously adapted, avoids erasing
or reifying culture and brings us to the schema of the patriarchal gender
contract and the gender regime within.

THE PATRIARCHAL GENDER CONTRACT: A DYNAMIC AND

HISTORICALLY EMBEDDED CULTURAL SCHEMA
Gender contract refers to a cultural schema that expects women and men
to live in heterosexual domestic units, where in modern economies men
are primarily responsible for the production of cash or in-kind transfers
of goods for domestic consumption, and women are primarily responsible
for care and reproductive work. The contract is a subconscious blueprint
that guides the proper way of being women or men and provides behavioral
scripts that may adapt to a range of situations and settings. The gender
contract evolves within a larger context of power. In this case, the
most relevant contexts are the gender regime (Sylvia Walby 2004), and
Palestinian Israelis minority status within an ethno-national order.
Patriarchal gender contracts yield obligations and entitlements. Men are
entitled to womens unpaid domestic labor and service, and in return
they are obliged to provide material goods and social protection. For
many women, particularly when state transfers are small or nonexistent,
these entitlements constitute a crucial safety net. Although women are
not compensated for their domestic labor with cash, they do receive
very tangible rights under the patriarchal contract (Deniz Kandiyoti 1988;
Jennifer C. Olmsted 2005a). In the particular case of sharia law, moreover,
some scholars even argue that womens entitlement to economic support is
not conditional on their domestic labor (Jennifer C. Olmsted 2005b).
On the ground, the generic gender contract, which is applicable across
cultures in the Middle East and North Africa and many other parts of
the world (Birgit Pfau-Effinger 1994; Valentine M. Moghadam 1998, 2003;
Heidi Gottfried 2000), yields more specific scripts with different practical
meanings for productive and reproductive work, and with varying degrees
of segregation between domestic and public work. Variations depend on
social class, state legacies, human resources, specific opportunity structures,
and the like. The concrete implications of the gender contract are
60
 THE GENDER CONTRACT UNDER NEOLIBERALISM

dynamic and amenable to negotiation and interpretation. But for all this
dynamism and variability, the underlying schema still exerts a powerful
effect on employment contracts, wages, and labor regulations, as well as on
womens and mens subjective sense of entitlement, gender propriety, and
employment ambitions (Khawla Abu Baker 2002; Sajeda Amin and Nagah
H. Al-Bassusi 2004; Amalia Saar 2009).
In the professional literature, the notion of a gender contract that
dictates the respective responsibilities to care, protect, and provide has
been discussed primarily through its legal and normative repercussions.
Particular emphases are commonly placed on the role of the state and
the religious establishment, and on the division of authority between
these entities and (male-dominated) families (Olmsted 2005a, 2005b; Heidi
Gottfried 2013). But no less important to consider is the way the gender
contract operates as a cultural schema. A close exploration of this aspect
of the contract allows us to trace the links between peoples ideas about
the proper ways of being women or men and the ways they strategize in
concrete, dynamic situations, calculate the value of their capital, and weigh
the costs of their employment opportunities.

GENDER REGIMES AND GENDER CONTRACTS AMONG

ISRAELI PALESTINIANS
To characterize the present state of the gender contract among
Israeli Palestinians, it is useful to consider the broader setting of
its operation, namely the gender regime the overall system of social
and symbolic organization of production, reproduction, identities,
relationships, entitlements, and obligations where the scripts of proper
feminine or masculine conduct are drawn up and negotiated. According to
Walby (2004), complex societies commonly have multiple gender regimes,
which are in an ongoing state of transformation from domestic centered
to public centered. Walby outlines three main types of gender regimes
for industrial and postindustrial countries, all public centered: market led,
welfare-state led, and regulatory-polity led. In the case of the Palestinian
citizens of Israel, the transition from domestic-centered to public-centered
regime was not mediated by state welfare, as it was for Israeli Jews.
This point is important for understanding both the recent pressures on
Palestinian women to enroll in paid employment and their responses to
these pressures.
Although Israel has had a relatively robust welfare system, its Palestinian
citizens were largely excluded from it during the first decades of Israeli
statehood (Zeev Rosenhek 1999). This situation changed somewhat over
the years. From the 1970s, Palestinian citizens were gradually admitted into
the welfare-state apparatus, in the double sense that they started receiving
more welfare benefits and that more social-service jobs became available,
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creating an important employment niche for women in particular (Michael

Shalev and Amit Lazarus 2013).
As for personal-status affairs, these remain under the jurisdiction of the
religious establishments, so civil marriage is not possible for any religious
group. Interestingly, the state does recognize civil marriages held abroad:
couples often travel abroad for the specific purpose of a civil marriage. On
their return, they are recognized as married; however, divorce still remains
exclusively in the hands of the respective religious courts. An important
development took place in the mid 1990s when after intense lobbying by
womens organizations, a civil family court was established, allowing women
in divorce procedures to sue for alimony, child support, and child custody.
It took another six years for the law to be amended to allow Muslim and
Christian women also to use this court. As for inheritance, while Muslim
and Christian women are officially entitled to share it equally with their
brothers, many retain the custom of forfeiting their inheritance in return
for the brothers life-long commitment to give them shelter if they divorce
or become widows.
So, despite significant achievements for women in the welfare and the
legal systems, the overall state protection available to Palestinian women
remains limited (recall, for example, the lack of subsidized daycare or
the states noninterference in labor law violations). Concurrently, the
impact of welfare transfers in reducing poverty is significantly lesser
among Palestinian than Jewish citizens (Alisa C. Lewin and Haya Stier
2002). As a result, the majority of the Palestinian citizens live on low
incomes, many in outright poverty (Mtanes Shihadeh and Foad Moadi
2011). These conditions have delayed the transition to a public-centered
gender regime because, despite the massive loss of land, people continue
to rely on domestic production and in-kind services to compensate for
low cash-income levels. So the gender regime for a large majority of
Israeli Palestinians remains predominantly domestic centered, with smaller-
scale, public-centered types operating alongside. One of these is the
welfare-state gender regime, which affects primarily urban, white-collar
professionals and entrepreneurs, who are integrated into the public sector
or the national Israeli economy. The other is a regulatory, polity-led
gender regime, which has become increasingly important since the 1990s,
following recurrent appeals by womens nongovernmental organizations to
state legislators and the court system to protect womens rights in family
and religious courts.
With the galloping privatization of the economy over the past twenty
years, Israeli Palestinians have experienced strong pressures to shift to
a market-led gender regime, in which more women are expected to
be in the workforce and an increasing share of domestic services are
purchased in the market. The transition is encouraged by the state,
which now officially supports independent Palestinian industries through
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 THE GENDER CONTRACT UNDER NEOLIBERALISM

subsidies and matching funds for entrepreneurs, and by building industrial

hothouses and parks.7 Despite the creation of new and accessible jobs,
this development is not always advantageous for women. In particular,
the rapid transition to a market-led gender regime that is not facilitated
by an extended welfare-state regime works to their disadvantage. As in
comparative ethnographic case studies (Jane Guyer 1988; Homa Hoodfar
1996), passage from a subsistence to a cash economy not mediated by
state-led protection mechanisms tends to have adverse effects on womens
economic well-being: as they lose their traditional access to production and
economic protection, they have little hope of compensation through the
market; this in turn makes them much more dependent on men, and in
all likelihood impoverishes them. In many respects, this is also true for
Israeli Palestinians, although they have already been integrated into cash
economy for decades since they lost their agricultural subsistence basis
in 1948. Although their communities have long been transformed from
villages into large, overcrowded towns that are called cities, but lack the
infrastructure of cities, Israeli Palestinians have continued to utilize their
domestic space for production, from growing food for self-consumption, to
constructing their own houses and holding backyard wedding celebrations
for hundreds of guests. These expenditure-saving activities have allowed
families within the cash economy to reduce their daily dependence on
cash flow and kept the relative contribution of women to their domestic
economy significantly high.
At the level of practice, the massive transitions in the gender regime
have generated adaptations of the gender contract, that cultural schema
that articulates the proper relationship between work and femininity or
masculinity. Awareness of the economic and practical value of womens
domestic work on the one hand, and of their poor wages on the other,
has played an important role in maintaining the idea that breadwinning
is primarily mens responsibility. Womens earnings are seen as strictly
supplementary and not considered part of their identity. Furthermore, they
are readily framed as negative if perceived to impair womens caregiving
responsibilities. That said, ideas about the right balance between wage
earning and homemaking have not been static. Over the years there
have been women who did go out to study and work, subsequently
developing professional identities and autonomous social circles, and the
number of dual-earner families has been rising steadily (Haya Stier 2013).
These developments, moreover, have made the idea of paid employment
attractive to many women, including nonacademics, women who have not
been in the workforce, or those who have irregular employment histories.
As shown in the what follows, women tend to have high expectations
of employment: besides economic independence, they expect that it will
expand their social circle, impart more meaning to their lives, and allow
them to become better role models to their children. Nevertheless, the
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gap between this vision and reality leads to ambivalence over the idea
of employment. The reality is that jobs perceived as right for women
part-time, close-to-home, clerical jobs are rare and poorly paid.
Women, particularly those employed in the Palestinian private sector,
report precarious employment, including salaries lower than the sum
written on their pay slips, harassment, overtime without pay, and arbitrary
redundancies (Amalia Saar 2011; Kayan 2014). So despite their hopes,
Israeli-Palestinian women remain hesitant to make paid employment a
more central component of femininity.

HOW THE GENDER CONTRACT MEDIATES PERCEIVED

OPPORTUNITIES
Here, I draw on research conducted in a 2010 back-to-work project in
Nazareth, which included twenty-eight semi-structured interviews, sixteen
with the projects participants (nonacademic high school graduates, ages
2047) and twelve with the professionals who operated the back-to-work
project. This study was part of a 200212 anthropological research project
on the economic empowerment of Jewish and Palestinian low-income
women in Israel. To make my own positionality transparent, I am a
Jewish-Israeli woman of Ashkenazi descent. My research of economic
empowerment emerged directly from my involvement, as a feminist activist,
in some of the first grassroots projects during the late 1990s. My work
with Palestinian-Israeli women, however, precedes my particular interest
in womens work. For more details about the dilemmas of a Jewish
scholar-cum-activist working with Palestinian women, see Saar (2016).
The larger research included participant observations in three Arabic-
speaking grassroots empowerment projects, which included many informal
conversations and often also led to invitations to visit womens homes;
forty-two life-history interviews with low-income Palestinian women and
additional twenty semi-structured interviews with Palestinian activists and
professionals, all recorded and transcribed verbatim; focus groups (a total
of forty Arabic-speaking participants); and a telephone survey with the
participants in business entrepreneurship workshops (a total of 121 Arabic-
speaking respondents; Saar 2016). While the present analysis is based
on content analysis of interviews collected in one particular segment of
the research project, my interpretations are supported by the cumulative
insights from this larger study.

Women seek work that is appropriate

One expression repeated throughout the interviews was I want to find
work that is appropriate for a woman reflecting the norm that womens
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 THE GENDER CONTRACT UNDER NEOLIBERALISM

employment is a supplement to family income, and that it is tolerable

only on the condition that it does not harm their caregiving and domestic
responsibilities. For the interviewees, appropriateness was measured by
the duration of shifts and travel distance; ideal working hours would be
9 a.m. to 1 p.m. The type of occupation also mattered: not too rough,
not humiliating, and not involving inappropriate interactions. Of course,
the practical meaning of inappropriate or humiliating interactions, or in
fact of the overall ideal of appropriate work, varied among subgroups and
according to the specific situation and depended on education and family
background, childrens ages, availability of older women relatives, degree
of economic hardship, the presence of a sick or disabled family member,
and so on. Another factor that influenced the meaning of appropriate
work was age. Women in their 20s, who were at a formative stage of adult
femininity and still expecting to cash in on the gender bargain, tended to
withdraw from jobs for relatively slight dissatisfactions. Conversely, women
in their late 30s and older characteristically had a more realistic economic
grasp. Often the husbands of such women were unable to act as sole
providers, and many of them had large mortgages, cumulative debts, or
were facing the rising cost of childrens education difficulties that younger
women do not usually anticipate. These women tended to be less picky
when looking for a job and fought harder to keep the jobs that they had.
Yet despite the differences, the protection of feminine propriety was a
recurring theme.
Inaya, age 29 and a married mother of one, lives half an hours drive
from Nazareth. She was trained and worked as a kindergarten assistant
for three years, then became a sharia pleader (an escort for women
litigants in sharia courts). However, she did not stay long in the new
profession because she and her husband felt it was too tough for a
woman. This is very difficult in our Arab society. I have seen many
women who quit this work and became teachers of religion instead. In
one of her cases, she accompanied a woman who was seeking divorce
from a drug addict, whom Inaya had to interview in jail. This experience,
which included some intimidation from the husbands lawyer, was too
unnerving.

Even if you go all the way to Mars you are still a woman, and at the
end of the day you belong in your home, with your children. They are
your responsibility, not your husbands. Someone who works until 1 or
2 p.m. can find the time to get back home and sit with her children
(supervise their homework). But if you work in the legal system you
come home with files that you need to go over, and this comes at the
expense of your son.

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The danger of failing as mothers

Probably the most striking aspect of the conditional legitimacy of womens
employment is their persistent worry that they might become bad mothers.
Similar worries, though less daunting, were also expressed with respect
to their performance as wives and homemakers. The message that
employed women are constantly at risk of failing to be good mothers is
communicated through multiple channels: gossip, direct admonitions from
their own mothers and other women, the talk of teachers, clergymen,
and psychologists, and popular songs. Admittedly, the ideal of good
motherhood is ambiguous to begin with because of the particular complex
regarding modernity and gender that characterizes Palestinian society
(Kanaaneh 2002; Amalia Saar 2007). On the one hand, mothers are
seen as altruistic and bearers of cultural continuity, which reinforces their
embedment in the sphere of domesticity. At the same time, they are
expected to be modern for the sake of their children, which means being
educated and generally adept in modern-life ways, in order to support their
children through school and adolescence. Paid employment may well be
regarded as a positive contribution in the latter respect, but not in the
former. Clearly, such contradictory expectations from motherhood, which
are not unique to Palestinian society, make room for agency, and women
indeed negotiate interpretations of propriety as they make decisions about
employment. Yet ambiguity also means that their interpretations may be
contested or turned against them.
Samira, holder of a Masters degree and general director of a small civil-
society organization, described her conflict:

The main obstacle that women face (when they become employed)
is mental: to know that you have a family and children and you are
leaving them behind. Personally, when I stay late for meetings and get
home, say, at 6 p.m., the pressure is not just to see to it that someone
picks them up from school and feeds them, and not even that my
husband will give me a long face. The most difficult thing is when my
mother calls and says: How could you leave them like that? This, I
think, is the most difficult thing that none of the studies has addressed.
Because then all the values that you were brought up with are dropped.
You are not fulfilling them: to be the good, caring mother, the hand
that rocks the cradle. [You betray] all those things that have been
inculcated in you.

Incompatible timelines: Public and domestic work times

Another point of friction occurs in the jarring disharmony between public
and domestic work time. While the former is linear, with short and preset
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 THE GENDER CONTRACT UNDER NEOLIBERALISM

breaks on weekends and main holidays, the latter is cyclical, replete

with events that require intensified work and have no parallel in public
work time: school vacations, weddings, agricultural harvests, sporadic
illnesses, frail or aging family members; these require ad hoc, open-ended
adjustments. Yet while domestic work time is constantly rearranged to cater
to official work requirements, public work time dismisses domestic work
requirements as noise. Consequently, women employees, who are never
entirely able to shake off the traces of domestic work time while doing
paid jobs, get tainted as unreliable. Of course, the very possibility of the
linear public work time becoming the norm is premised on the mens a
priori exemption from responsibility for childrearing and caretaking and
on womens unpaid performance of these tasks. Concomitantly, womens
persistent failure to realize this norm is not because they are more cultural
than men or because they are moving from a culture-saturated to a culture-
neutral sphere, but because the very cultural logic of the official work arena
rests on their exclusion.
Haneen is a 27-year-old married mother of two, from a village near
Nazareth. She has a high-school degree and a computer technician
certificate, but no occupational experience. She worked briefly as a
secretary after marrying her paternal cousin, but resigned following the
birth of her second child.

I got pregnant with my second child when my first one was six months
old, and decided to stay home with them until they went to school. I
wanted to dedicate myself to my children. My mistake was that I did not
follow developments outside the home. In those six years, there were
huge developments with computers. People started using the Internet,
Facebook . . . I heard about it, but did not experiment with it directly
because I thought I didnt need it.

Now that her sons have started school, she faces several impediments
in her attempts to get a job. Since her husband, a chemical engineer
working in Tel Aviv, leaves home daily at 5 a.m. and returns at 9 p.m.,
she confines her search to a 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. job to accommodate her
childrens school time. She wants to work as a secretary, but a years
searching has not yet yielded a suitable job. She also testifies that the
years spent outside the job market made her lose her confidence, and
is aware that she needs further training. Haneen wants to find a job in
order to help her husband financially. But more than that, she wants
to get out of the house. This, she says, will help her children become
more independent and make her more open to life. Her husband does
not object, but the main difficulty is finding a part-time job close to
home.
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The vulnerability of women in the official workforce

These various exclusion mechanisms affect womens ongoing status and
experiences within the employment market, assuming they enter it. The
construction of womens official work as semi-voluntary, temporary, and
secondary to both mens official work and their own domestic work
paves the way to various forms of abusive employment. As mentioned,
the majority of employed Palestinian women are confined to the enclave
economy. Employment in the enclave economy has its benefits: women
travel shorter distances, remain in their cultural and linguistic comfort
zone, are largely protected from racist treatment, and have fewer groups
to compete with (Khattab 2003). And for highly educated women who
are employed in public-sector social-service jobs, employment conditions
are actually relatively equitable (Shalev and Lazarus 2013). Yet outside
the public-sector safe haven, employment in the enclave economy
has numerous shortcomings: narrower job supply, salaries often lower
than minimum wage, patronizing attitudes, sexual harassment, arbitrary
dismissal, and so on (Kayan 2014). Half the interviewees reported
experiencing one or more of these forms of abusive employment. While the
cultural construction of womens paid work helps justify such treatment, its
direct basis is structural. The enclave-economy businesses operate within
narrow profit margins and benefit from the structural vulnerability of
women employees. For their part, many women eschew fighting for their
rights and prefer instead to leave a frustrating job, feeding into their
fragmentary work histories, stalled mobility, and wavering confidence.
Diana, a 36-year-old married mother of three from a village in Galilee,
earned NIS 1,400 (approximately US$360) monthly at her part-time job as
an assistant kindergarten teacher. My husband taunts me, saying, What
good will that do us? You can barely buy a plate of shawarma (fast food)
with it. Amal, a 20-year-old unmarried woman from Nazareth, earned
the same sum at a full-time job in a retail store. She now works at her
uncles plant for less than the minimum wage and is too embarrassed
to ask for a raise. Rawan, 23 and single, from a village near Nazareth, is
a certified technician of architectural design. She already worked in two
offices in Nazareth, but left when the pay turned out to be less than what
appeared in her contract. Naila, 39, a married mother of three teenagers
from Nazareth, holds a teachers assistant diploma in special education.
She and her husband, an employee at a marble factory, need her salary
to pay their accumulating debts. During her twenty years of marriage she
held several jobs, but also stayed outside the job market for ten years when
her children were small. At its highest, her salary was the minimum wage,
but she mostly did not reach that level. Nailas narrative is replete with
frustration caused by her low wages, her employers patronizing attitudes
when she worked in a private educational institution, the competitive

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 THE GENDER CONTRACT UNDER NEOLIBERALISM

atmosphere when she worked as a saleswoman in retail chains, and the

recurrent arbitrary dismissals. But unlike when she was younger, now she
cannot afford to stay home, so she moves from one retail chain to another
and hopes that her enrollment in the empowerment project (where I met
her) may yield the right connections to work in a municipal kindergarten,
with pension and social benefits.

Work and self-fulfillment

It is important to note that despite frustrating awareness of limited
opportunities, low salaries, and contradictory demands of care- and cash-
work, women still want to be employed; and not just because they need
the income. Rather, they tend to embrace the idea that a job is important
for self-fulfillment. Expressions to that effect came up repeatedly in the
interviews, side by side with stories about difficult work experiences. I felt
that I was seeing the world. I met new people. I felt that I had something
to give besides my domestic work (Sabreen, 33-year-old married mother of
two). I want to bring out to the world whats in me . . . I want to develop
my personality. I want to learn to be independent and not just at home
(Ikhlas, 22, married with no children). When I started working I finally
felt that I had a place in life that was mine, which wasnt home (Abir,
29, a married mother of two). Work allowed me to meet other people in
Nazareth and learn what goes on around me (Rabia, 27, married with two
children).
Women assess whether to take and stay on a job based on what they
feel is the right thing to do as women. More specifically, they reveal a
gender script that combines traditional perceptions of women as caretakers
and the neoliberal ideal of self-fulfillment through the market. A primary
preoccupation is to do the right thing by their children. This mostly means
upholding a delicate balance between hands-on caretaking and supervising
schooling responsibilities that ultimately require womens presence at
home and setting a modern role model by getting out of the house and
integrating in the workforce. They likewise convey the manifold frictions
between the domestic and paid work requirements, which simultaneously
compromise womens performance as employees and as mothers-wives.
Interviews also reveal how the gender-contract script affects employers.
Employers tendency to offer women part-time jobs, to pay them well below
the legal minimum wage, fire them at random and, not rarely, harass them
overtly or covertly, clearly rests on a shared sense that womens presence
in the official workforce is right, but not quite. And yet, the interviews also
reveal that women are actually eager to work outside the home, precarious
employment and poignantly felt compromises notwithstanding. Beside or
even more than an income, they expect that a job will give them an
opportunity for fulfillment and growth. Intriguingly, women tend to be
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quite self-persuasive when expressing such expectations, even when these

are contradicted by their own experiences. Although most women still do
not enroll in the official workforce because jobs are still scarce, salaries
are low, and the cost of care substitutes is high, their opportunity-cost
calculations entail embedded economic rationality, which is replete with
ambivalence due to conflicting expectations.

THE CULTURAL EMBEDDEDNESS OF

WORK-OPPORTUNITY STRUCTURE
The low LFP of Palestinian-Israeli women should be analyzed within the
gender regime, that is the larger socio-symbolic system that shapes their
praxis, and their objective and perceived opportunities, which is currently
transitioning from a domestic-centered to a public-centered, market-
led type. Palestinian-Israeli women face growing pressures to become
employed. Besides an increasing practical dependence on money for
purchased goods, higher education, and supplementary health insurance
the pressures are rooted in an all-encompassing neoliberal logic that
channels more and more aspects of life, including ideas about personal
growth, modernity, and progress, through the symbolic sieve of the market.
For many women, the economic need to increase their families cash flow
readily merges with their own desires to join the workforce as a means of
being modern and up-to-date. Still, Israeli-Palestinian women do not join
the paid workforce in large numbers. This keen, but reserved, approach
reflects a complex economic rationality that echoes the pitfalls of the
transitional gender regime.
I used the term gender contract to trace the process by which women
navigate conflicting expectations and make practical decisions regarding
work. As we have seen, a womans decision to look for, take, or stay on
a job, an employers decision to hire or fire a woman, or a husbands
approval all are invariably mediated by a shared sense of feminine
propriety. A parallel shared sense of masculine propriety is true for
mens employment; but that is not the focus of this paper. Yet because
the setting is dynamic, there is always more than one way of being a
normative, moral woman. This leverage is inherent to the schema of the
gender contract, which like any cultural schema is necessarily flexible and
adaptable, while setting clear boundaries for possible maneuverings. The
present transitional stage of the gender regime, when the pressures are
strong to become, as it were, self-sufficient, yet the economic benefits of
paid employment are still not entirely clear, poses a serious challenge to
the schema of the gender contract. Women know, if not in so many words,
that by becoming wage earners they risk their well-established entitlement
to economic sustenance within the marital home. On the other hand, the
male-breadwinner/female-caretaker bargain is eroding anyway, as a result
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 THE GENDER CONTRACT UNDER NEOLIBERALISM

of mens low wages and employment insecurity (Gharrah 2011), and of

rising standards of living; it is also eroding because women want to be at
once self-supporting and protected.
The gender contract has a dual analytical and theoretical significance.
Analytically, it explores the embedded economic rationality that guides
womens strategizing vis--vis the labor market. It sheds light on the way
culture mediates economic decisions, the way economic opportunities
are culturally embedded, and the way agency operates not as a free-
floating force but within clear boundaries of structure, morality, and
history. Culture, then, needs to be brought into the analysis of womens
employment not, however, as a static factor but as a dynamic
mechanism that not only restricts but also stretches and adapts possibilities.
Failure to do so reinforces two common misconceptions: one is the
assumption, shared by practically all parties to the debate on Israeli-
Palestinian womens low LFP, that paid work is categorically good for
women, an assumption that is seriously undermined when considering
the full range of womens work and the complex economic-cum-moral
bargaining that it entails (Maria S. Floro 1999; Roksana Bahramitash
and Jennifer C. Olmsted 2014; Mahdi Majbouri 2016). The second
is the assumption that the impact of culture diminishes or even
disappears at the core of the modern capitalist workforce, where it
is replaced by a universal economic rationality, but lingers closer to
the margins of the workforce, where minority women are typically
found.
Theoretically, the gender contract affords a concrete example for my
argument regarding the mutual entanglement of culture and the structure
of opportunities. This brings me full circle to the problem with which
I opened this paper, namely the simplistic nature of the debate over
Palestinian-Israeli womens low LFP. Palestinian women who enter the
workforce, or stay out of it, do not move from a culturally saturated
nonwork domestic sphere to a culture-neutral work sphere. Rather, they
move between two work spheres dominated by a shared cultural logic.
The gender contract is a central mechanism that regulates work in both
these spheres. The framing within this mechanism of cash production as
mens responsibility affects the LFP calculations of wives, husbands, and
employers alike; the framing of womens domestic work as nonwork
affects the overall chances of women and men alike of entering, surviving,
and thriving in the official workforce. Moreover, this cultural mechanism
that directs people in making concrete, personal decisions is rooted in
the larger structures of institutional and political power, notably the gender
regime and the ethno-national order.
The ethnographic examples offered a glimpse into how culture and
structure articulate in womens practical, everyday work strategies. We
have seen how women navigate between the perception of employment
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as a coveted venue for personal growth and the reality of meagre or

nonexistent childcare services, incompatible timelines, or humiliating
salaries, themselves the upshot of a work market saturated with racist-
cum-sexist assumptions regarding the value of Palestinian womens work.
In important respects, the challenges facing Palestinian Israeli women
resemble those facing women in other Middle Eastern communities, who
experience a rapacious transition to a market-led gender regime infused
with neoliberal ideals of individual self-sufficiency and suffering from too
little economic buffers (zlem Altan-Olcay 2014). However, their case is
also somewhat unique. The extreme gaps in infrastructure between Jews
and Palestinians and the stalled integration of the latter into the national
economy have delayed the transformation of the gender contract because
the returns for womens employment do not compensate for reduced
domestic production and concomitantly for the loss of their entitlement to
economic support within the household. The transformation of the gender
contract in their case, moreover, is made particularly coarse by the fact
that the shift from a domestic centered to a market-led, public-centered
gender regime has lacked the buffer of a transitional welfare-state, public-
centered phase. This is largely the reason for the deep ambivalence that
informs womens attitudes, who yearn to join the workforce but remain
very cautious about actually doing so. Lastly, the aggressive privatization of
the Israeli economy has had particularly ironic implications for Palestinian-
Israeli women. The idea of the market as a magic wand, which has
captivated the imagination of policymakers, all too eager to keep the
states responsibility at minimum, has intensified culturist stereotyping.
By offering a new, depoliticized language to talk about diversity, it has
effectively reinforced an essentialized concept of culture as the taken-
for-granted barrier to womens integration. This paper thus makes several
interventions: it offers a comprehensive explanation for the low LFP of
Israeli-Palestinian women; adds a more nuanced cultural perspective to
the growing feminist literature on gender contracts; and shows that it is
possible to do a cultural analysis that is not culturist. I have argued that
a comprehensive analysis of the actual effects of economic privatization
on women and of womens complex responses to it needs to include
their dialectic entanglement with culture. This, of course, is true to LFP
patterns in general, well beyond the specific case of racialized women. The
fourth and final intervention of this paper is to argue for the integration of
a cultural perspective into analyses of LFP in general, of core and marginal
groups alike.

Amalia Saar
University of Haifa, Department of Anthropology
Mount Carmel, Haifa 31905, Israel
e-mail: saaramalia@gmail.com
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 THE GENDER CONTRACT UNDER NEOLIBERALISM

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTOR
Amalia Saar is a cultural anthropologist. She is Senior Lecturer and Head
of the Anthropology Department (in the making) at the University of
Haifa. She has done research with Palestinian citizens of Israel, focusing
on gender constructions and politics, and with low-income women in
Israel who enroll in economic empowerment schemes. Her fields of
expertise include feminist theory, urban anthropology, action research,
and generational relations in the feminist movement. Her 2016 book is
titled Economic Citizenship: Neoliberal Paradoxes of Empowerment (Berghahn
Books).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Research was made possible thanks to the generous support of the Israel
Science Foundation, research grant No. 1094/08, and a philanthropic
fund that wishes to remain anonymous. I thank research assistant Noor
Fallah for her valuable insights, al-Tufula Center and particularly Nabila
Espanioly for granting me access to the project, and the interviewees who
trusted us with their stories. All personal information that would allow the
identification of any person or person(s) described in the article has been
removed.

NOTES
1 Calcalist (economic daily), April 4, 2012.
2 I have chosen the title Israeli Palestinian, which admittedly may sound offensive to
Jews and Arabs alike, because it reflects the dual components of their inclusion and
exclusion with respect to the state. For a more elaborate discussion of identity politics
among the Palestinians inside Israel, see Saar (2007); Amalia Saar and Taghreed
Yahya-Younis (2008).
3 This review does not include Palestinian women in the West Bank and Gaza Strip,
whose LFP is generally much lower and more precarious still. For initial reference, see
Samira Haj (1992); Jennifer C. Olmsted (1996); Ray L. Huntington, Camille Fronk,
and Bruce A. Chadwick (2001).
4 Center for Bedouin Studies and Development, Annual Statistical Review (2004),
cmsprod.bgu.ac.il/Centers/bedouin/statistic_yearbook/chapter4.htm.
5 For example, in the government sector, which is the biggest employer of women in
Israel, Palestinian citizens constitute only 5.5 percent of employees in government
ministries and their subsidiaries (excluding the Ministry of Education), and only a
third of these are women (Aziz Haidar 2005).
6 The choice of terminology here is hardly coincidental. Typically, members of the
Israeli establishment and mainstream academics use the title Arab, whereas critical
scholars and activists opt for Palestinian.
7 Personal interview with the head of the Authority for Economic Development in the
Arab, Druze, and Circassian Sector at the Prime Ministers Office, July 2012.

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