Do women in the Muslim world place gender inequality among their societies biggest problems?
Not typically. While relatively few women and men chose “equal legal rights” as a description they would associate with the Muslim world, gender inequality did not commonly appear as an unprompted response in open-ended questions critiquing the region. That is, unlike their American counterparts, Muslim women don’t spontaneously cite gender inequality as an aspect of Islamic societies they don’t like. Rather, the aspects of the Arab/Muslim world that Muslim women most often said they admired least were similar to those that their male counterparts most often complained about — lack of unity among Muslims, extremism, and political corruption topped the list. Gender inequality was not mentioned at all in response to this question among Jordanian women, and was cited by no more than 2% of women in Egypt and Morocco. It was mentioned somewhat more frequently by Saudi women (5%), but “lack of unity” and “high unemployment” outranked it. The two exceptions were Lebanon and Turkey, by far th
