Public policies addressing women’s issues have been widely divergent in the world. Not only worldwide variation of gender equality has been broad, but also regional variations have been very obtrusive. Concerning Muslim societies, the public policies addressing women’s problems widely differ from one country to another. For example, in Turkey women enfranchised in 1930 even before the enfranchisement of women in many European countries, whereas women in Saudi Arabia still cannot vote. There is not only variation of gender equality policies from one country to other but also over time or across different issues (Htun and Weldon, 2010). In Iran, for example, even though family law asserts secondary roles to women, the policies related to women’s health and women’s education have been relatively successful as more than 60 percent of tertiary enrolments in Iran composed by female students. However, the variation of gender equality policies in-between Muslim countries has been mostly overlooked in cross-national comparative studies by concluding that Muslim societies are less women-friendly than the rest of the world. Questioning those macro theories and generalizations, this study aims to provide some empirical evidence about similarities and differences of gender policy dynamics between Muslim and non-Muslim countries. The main argument of the paper is that gender equality policy in Muslim countries is not one but many and there is no such a clear fault line between Muslim and non Muslim countries when it comes to adoption of gender equality policies.
The main research questions that will be addressed by this study will be ‘why some (Muslim) countries are more likely to adopt gender equality policies than others?’, Which gender equality policies are more likely to be adopted by countries particularly by Muslim countries? ‘Are there some general patterns between countries about the adoption of those policies?’ and ‘Do Muslim countries differ from those patterns in some way?’, ‘Are there different factors accounting for different dimensions of gender equality policies across countries?’ ‘What are the determinants of gender equality policies around the world and do they match the Muslim contexts?’.
In answering these questions, this study takes gender equality policy as a multi dimensional framework concept. Following some arguments of Mazur (2002), in this study gender equality policy will be taken in two levels: 1) policy sectors and 2) policy issues. In literature there have been mainly two approaches to study government response to gender equality issues. First approach based on the analysis of various issues of gender equality policy such as abortion issue or women’s political representation. Secondly, Mazur’s (2002) applied an approach which takes gender equality policy as a separate sector of government policies and extended the analysis into eight subsectors of gender equality policy. This study aims to combine sectoral and issue based approaches and makes an attempt to analyze relationship between various sectors and issues. In doing that this study accommodates large N comparative analysis techniques. First of all, a cross-national comparison of 88 countries including 19 predominantly Muslim countries will be held and secondly, variance in-between Muslim countries will be analyzed.
