In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), just 18% of women are formally employed, according to the World Bank, far below the global average of 49%.
Women in the region face varied barriers to entering the workforce, including legal restrictions, cultural pressures and violent conflicts. But one of the major factors behind the lack of women in the workforce is traditional gender roles, which place the burden of unpaid care work on them, said Susanne Mikhail Eldhagen, director of Women Employment in the Green, STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) and Care Economy for UN Women.
Unpaid care work, which can include childcare, eldercare and domestic chores, is a drastically undervalued part of the economy in the Arab world, and is the biggest barrier to women’s participation in the workforce globally, according to the International Labour Organization.
Bolstering the care economy, which encompasses care services, health and education, is one of the major focuses of an initiative launching this year, involving 22 governments and more than 100 private sector and international finance institutions. It is the next phase of UN Women’s goal to raise women’s employment in the region by 5% by 2030 by creating 400,000 jobs in key markets, such as the green and STEM sectors, which are rapidly growing in the region, in addition to the care economy.
Eldhagen said it’s not just about the economic benefits: “When a woman is economically and financially independent, it also affects other areas in her life, whether it’s political participation, decision-making powers domestically, or the public space.”
“High return on investment”
Currently, the MENA region’s care services are estimated to meet just 10% of demand, said Eldhagen.
Many governments are already taking action. In 2021, Egypt recategorized nurseries as micro-, small- and medium enterprises (MSMEs), which provides greater business benefits, including tax markdowns, and in 2024, Jordan streamlined the registration process for home-based nurseries, making it simpler to start a child-minding business from home.
Improving access to childcare alone is not enough to reduce the burden of care, which often involves other housework, said Ragui Assaad, a research fellow at the Economic Research Forum, a network that promotes economic research to boost sustainable development in the region.
He believes investment is needed across the entire health, education and social care sector to reduce the burden of unpaid care work from multiple angles.
Reframing the way governments view spending on education or health — as “investment” rather than “expenditure” — could also create an environment for more future-thinking decision-making, said Assaad: “There’s a huge amount of research that shows that investing in, let’s say, early childhood care and education, has a very high return on investment.”
Last year, Saudi Arabia’s female workforce hit a record high of 36%, significantly more than the regional average – due to the nation’s investment into comprehensive care policies, including “interventions such as the Qurrah childcare subsidy, increased maternity leave, flexible work options, and expanded vocational training for women in traditionally male-dominated occupations,” said El-Kogali, who delivered a keynote speech that highlighted the Kingdom’s rapid gender reforms in the workplace at the Global Labor Market Conference in Riyadh last week.
“In MENA, closing the gender gap in employment could increase GDP per capita by 51% in the average economy. In this context, women’s economic empowerment and opportunities must be at the center of the agenda for inclusive growth in our region,” she added.
An undervalued sector
Workforce participation rates for women vary wildly across the region, from 5% in Yemen to 63% in Qatar, and in some countries, much of that is in the form of foreign workers: in Qatar, for example, excluding foreign female workers, the participation rate was just 37% in 2018.
Migrant workers, both male and female make up a huge proportion of the region’s labor force, particularly in the Arab states. More than 1.6 million migrant women are employed in the Arab states as domestic workers, elevating female labor participation rates and enabling more local women to enter the workforce.
But this has its issues. Migrant domestic workers in the Arab states are often explicitly excluded from labor laws, or accounted for in legislation that provides lower labor standards than for citizens.
Charlotte Karam — a professor at the Telfer School of Management at the University of Ottawa, Canada, and leader of the Beirut-based SAWI Project, which aims to improve data on Arab women in the workplace — said many women in the region feel frustrated that the only way they can have a successful career is through “marginalized” foreign domestic workers. This is a global problem, she said, adding that even paid care work is undervalued. “There needs to be some sort of revolution to recognize the importance of care work, and how it’s fundamentally the foundation upon which all other economies function.”
While robust care policies and infrastructure are still lacking in many nations, Karam says she’s witnessed huge progress since she began working in the MENA region a decade ago.
“The rate of change in some of these more stable nations that have resources is very quick in comparison to the trajectory of women in the workforce in many other countries across the world,” she said.
There’s a cultural shift happening with men in the region, too, according to surveys conducted by UN Women.
“Seventy-six percent of all men in the Arab states region claim very explicitly that they spend too little time with their children,” said Eldhagen, adding that 86% of decision-makers in the Arab states are in favor of longer paternity leave.
Changes like this could help redistribute domestic work more evenly between couples, allowing more women to enter the formal economy and lessening the dependency of households on a single income, said Eldhagen.
“There’s a very clear indication around when you get that second income, you can invest more in education and health. That’s good for the community, for the family, and, of course, for the nation overall,” she added.