By Amy Cass
Women are notoriously complicated. Even Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, struggled to understand the so-called second sex, famously asking: “What does a woman want?’” Men, by contrast, are usually thought of as the relatively what-you-see-is-what-you-get gender, but is being a man really simpler? Men are an understudied species, and stereotypes of manhood abound. In the Middle East, where men control so many aspects of public and private life, ignorance about the pressures faced by men contributes to the gender gulf.
“Understanding Masculinities,” a report released in May by UN Women and the Brazilian NGO Promundo, seeks to better understand the realities of Arab manhood, which can be a delicate subject in the current political climate. The paper analyzes the results of the Middle East and North Africa International Men and Gender Equality Survey (IMAGES), which exhaustively polled nearly 10,000 men and women in four Arab countries—Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco and Palestine—for 13 months beginning in April 2016 on topics ranging from their childhood upbringing to workplace-related stress. In talking to women as well as men, the report seeks to provide a comprehensive view of Middle Eastern men as “sons and fathers and husbands” as well as just men and provides interesting insights into what women and men see differently as well as what they agree on.
Egyptians will be unsurprised to learn that most of their countrymen—and women—do not believe in gender equality. Egypt has passed a number of laws in recent years in favor of women’s rights—such as raising the legal age for marriage to 18 and allowing women to initiate divorce and pass on citizenship to their husbands and children. However, many of these changes have taken place solely on paper, which is reflected by the responses of around 2,700 Egyptians across the governorates of Cairo, Menoufia, Sharkia, Sohag and Beni Suef. The report rated their views according to its Gender Equitable Men, or GEM, scale, which ranked respondents on a scale from zero to three, zero being neanderthal gender views and three for endorsing total equality. Egyptian men scored a paltry average of 0.9 on this scale, while their female counterparts didn’t do much better, scoring a mean 1.3, lower than Lebanon, Morocco or Palestine. In other words, “The patriarchy is alive and well, in public and private life.”
Of course, local beliefs about gender roles are shaped by religion and economic realities as well as traditional cultural perceptions of masculinity. In Egypt, the 2011 revolution and its populist aspirations did little to counter “conservative forces” that “continue to constrain the lives of women and girls and reinforce rigid ideas about manhood.” Many Egyptian women as well as men don’t believe in women working outside their homes or participating in public life and think the husband should have the last word. A large percentage of women still undergo female circumcision, and many men routinely beat their wives. When work opportunities are scarce, men should get the jobs first, said 98 percent of Egyptian men and 88 percent of women. Most believe that a man has a duty to exercise guardianship over his female relatives. And the majority of both women and men see women as wives and mothers first.
Masculinity in Egypt is marked by freedom, with men having significantly more latitude to make decisions and act without family control. For example, while more than three-quarters of men in the survey make their own decisions about whom and how to marry, almost 90 percent of women say the decision falls mainly to their parents, especially the father. The other side of the coin is that with freedom comes responsibility, and “men face tremendous pressure to be providers.” Most Egyptians believe it’s a man’s duty to provide for his wife, children, parents and even siblings. Almost 80 per cent of Egyptian men are the main family breadwinner, while just 16 percent of the women surveyed had a job.
Meanwhile, more than half of the men surveyed reported frequently feeling stressed about lack of work and not being able to meet their family’s daily needs. Economic realities have made it more difficult than ever for Egyptian men to make a living and support their families. Some 44 percent of the men in the survey said they worked only “seasonally or occasionally” and 40 percent reported spending “most of their time out of work or looking for work.” A significant portion of men said they’d resorted to going abroad for work, especially to the Arab Gulf. The survey responses painted a grim picture of a male population that’s increasingly frustrated by their inability to fulfill their traditional role as providers, a “hallmark of masculinity, reinforced by societal expectations.”
Both sexes hold traditional views of women’s roles in the home and workplace. Women are still expected to be wives and mothers first. Some 73 percent of women and 68 percent of men in the survey said it’s is more important for a women to marry than to have a career. This attitude is reflected in the paltry number of Egyptian females that participate in the labor force—less than 20 percent, according to Ministry of Health and Population statistics. Men and women agree that women do the majority of housework, and fewer than a quarter of men reported having participated in household tasks, including cooking or cleaning, in the previous month.
Still, there are signs that views are slowly shifting, particularly regarding women in the workplace. A surprising 77 percent of the men in the survey believe a female candidate with the same qualifications can do an equally good job as a man, and 74 percent said they support equal salaries for equal work. On the other hand, almost three-quarters of men—and more than half of women—said they thought that women were “too emotional” to serve as political leaders. A little more than half of men surveyed believed that women’s participation in politics would make them unable to be good wives and mothers, and 35 percent of women agreed. While 88 percent of the men said they weren’t opposed to working alongside female colleagues, just 55 percent would be willing to work for a female boss.
There are signs that Egyptian men and women are starting to be more divided on traditional gender roles in the home. For example, 90 percent of men but just 60 percent of women in the survey said the husband should have the final say at home. Three quarters of women but less than a third of men believe that a married woman should have the same right to work outside the home as her husband. Female respondents approve of women as the heads of political parties, heads of states, judges and soldiers in significantly higher numbers than male respondents. Just one-third of the female respondents said unmarried women should be able to live on their own—but only a small fraction of men agreed.
In all the countries surveyed, wealthier people appear to hold more progressive attitudes about gender, and urban residents have more equitable attitudes than those in rural districts. Upbringing also has an impact. Men who saw their parents share housework and decision-making score higher on the scale. Young Egyptian women tended to have more liberal views than older ones, but their young male counterparts did not—an anomaly that held true in all the countries in the MENA survey except Lebanon. By contrast, “In nearly every other country where IMAGES has been carried out (in other regions of the world), younger men have consistently shown more equitable attitudes and key practices than their older counterparts,” noted the authors, who speculated that tough economic conditions that have put undue financial pressure on young Arab men may have led to a gender equality “backlash,” and a renewed climate of religious conservatism in recent years may also be to blame.
Above all, though, education is the most important factor in promoting gender equality. Men “with higher education, whose mothers had more education, and whose fathers carried out traditionally feminine household tasks are more likely to hold gender-equitable attitudes,” concluded the report. “History is likely to repeat itself.”
But it may be the realities of daily life in the modern world that encourage people with outmoded beliefs about gender roles to change their minds. Among Arab men who are more progressive, “their actions, more often than not, represent pragmatic choices based on circumstance rather than ideological stands on gender equality or calculated resistance against the pressures of social convention.” When men have to take jobs that are traditionally the purview of women, for example, “they do not see themselves as lesser men.” The best hope for moving forward means “identifying and supporting these daily demonstrations of gender equality.”
© Business Monthly 2017
