“I’m not sure state feminism, at least in its Arab version, can ever lead to genuine change – not in the short term.” Political sociologist Dr Rola El-Husseini is talking about her 2023 article for the Arab Center Washington DC, in which she argues Arab governments are adapting state feminism facets to suit their own agendas. “I’m building on work by Aili Tripp,” she tells me, “to argue that Arab regimes are instrumentalising Western norms of women’s rights to consolidate their hold on power and present themselves to the international community as modernising.”
Dorothy McBride Stetson and Amy G Mazur defined state feminism in their 1995 book, Comparative State Feminism, as “state-based mechanisms charged formally with furthering women’s status and gender equality”. In other words, what governments do to address women’s rights, from enabling them to take positions of power to ensuring and maintaining gender equality, factoring women’s needs into policy-making decisions and beyond.
State feminism is intended to be progressive – a positive move forward. However, other voices reflect Rola’s concerns. In 2023, a Gender In Geopolitics Institute article pointed out that “despite the ostentatious state feminism employed by Arab governments, the region remains the one with the largest gender equality gap in the world”. And a 2022 essay The Women’s Quota in Morocco as an Instrument of Regime Support for Rowaq Arabi – a journal by the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies – noted that “..non-democratic regimes often enact women-friendly policies for the purpose of maintaining power as opposed to genuine political empowerment.”
There are degrees of positive change. In 2022, Jordan’s constitution was amended to pronounce that all “Jordanian men and women shall be equal before the law”. In 2019, the UAE introduced reforms to improve working conditions for women. Yet the manipulation of state feminism continues to manifest. Some countries implement gender quota systems, although these commitments to include women in governance often fail under scrutiny. After promising gender equality in political elections in 2011 (and changing the constitution to increase female representation in government), in 2022 the Tunisian government reversed the decision, even though the constitution still contains the promise.
Despite legislative changes, the Arab Reform Initiative claims that the Moroccan government uses new gender parity pledges to attract votes. The Initiative indicates that, having made commitments to including more women in legislation processes, women are still excluded from key electoral bodies.
In civil life, too, countries vocalise their state feminist credentials as data contradicts their claims. While the Saudi Arabian regime has committed to continue to improve the role of women as part of the country’s Vision 2030 development plan and introduced policy reform, including the abolition of male guardianship in 2019 and permitting women to live alone for the first time in 2021, the 2023 Global Gender Gap Report still places Saudi at 131st of the 146 countries studied in terms of the gap in equality between men and women.
In Egypt, the government’s recent announcement of “a significant increase in the number of women occupying high managerial posts, and other positions previously closed to women” is at odds with the country’s position of 134th in the same report.
For more on why governments bend definitions of state feminism to fit agendas, Rola points to How Autocrats Weaponize Women’s Rights, a 2022 Project Muse report that coined the term ‘genderwashing’. The report says “..by taking credit for advances in gender equality, autocratic governments put the spotlight on an area that is widely seen as linked with democracy, while drawing the focus away from persistent authoritarian practices”. Thus, genderwashing happens when regimes use their purported support for women’s rights to improve their international standing and distract from alleged abuses.
So, with the continual use of state feminism mechanisms for political and image-improving motives, how can the situation improve for women in the Arab region? Professor of political science Daniela Donno says that gains for women need to move beyond the symbolic. “A serious commitment to gender equality involves real dialogue with the women’s movement,” she suggests. “And, ideally, allowing civil society a seat at the table in the negotiation of legal and constitutional change. A vibrant and autonomous feminist civil society then has a role to play in educating women about their rights and providing them with legal assistance needed to claim those rights.”
Simon Coates is a London-based writer and artist whose work has appeared in publications including The New European and Scottish newspaper The National
