Facing Barriers

Palestinian women have slowly become active in the formal labor market in Israel. In this book, Vered Kraus and Yuval Yonay describe and analyse the labor experience of these Palestinian women, and explain why Palestinian and Jewish women have different rates and outcomes in the labor market. Challenging popular views that ascribe these differences to Arab culture and Islam, they instead find that it is state policies and widespread discrimination that hinder Palestinian women's participation and success. By including the various Palestinian sub-groups - Muslims, Bedouins, Druze, Christians, non-citizen residents of Jerusalem - this book shows how the specific life circumstances of the women from these subgroups affect their employment and achievements. The book thus enriches the acute discussion on the labour market experiences of Muslim and Arab women in the Middle East and North Africa and in advanced industrialized societies.

Vered Kraus is Professor Emerita in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Haifa. She was previously a Fellow and a Visiting Professor at the National Academy of Sciences (Washington, DC), Duke University, North Carolina, University of Southern California, University of California, Berkeley, Zentralarchiv für Empirische Sozialforschung (ZUMA), Mannheim, Germany, Max-Planck-Institut für Bildungsforschung, Berlin, and Nuffield College, Oxford. In the course of forty years, she has published numerous books and articles of labour market achievements and inequality between ethnic groups and genders, including Promises in the Promised Land (1991, with Robert William Hodge), and Secondary Breadwinners (2002). Yuval Yonay is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Haifa, Israel. He was previously a Member of the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton University, New Jersey, and a Visiting Professor at the École Normale Supérieure des Mines de Paris, University of California, Berkeley, and Technische Universität in Berlin. He has written multiple papers on economic knowledge production, sexuality, and Palestinian Jewish relations, as well as The Struggle over the Soul of Economics (1998) on the development of modern economics.