Religiosity and Muslims’ gender role attitudes toward women’s right to work

Abstract

This study aimed to examine the effect of religiosity on the gender role attitudes of Muslims toward women’s right to work. It probed the cognitive, affective, and behavioral components of religiosity and tested whether measures derived from these components affect Muslims’ agreement with the statement that when jobs are scarce, men should have more rights to a job than women. This study employs individual-level data from the sixth and seventh waves of the World Values Surveys and adopts logistic regression analysis as the main empirical methodology. The main findings reaffirmed the effect of religiosity. Muslims who are more religious are more likely to have gender role attitudes that favor men’s right to work over women’s when jobs are scarce. This is true for religiosity measured by beliefs in hell, the importance of God in life, the importance of religion in life, the frequency of prayer, and the frequency of religious service attendance. Participation in religious organizations as a measure of behavioral religiosity has only a weak effect on the gender role attitudes of Muslims toward women’s right to work. These findings highlight the importance of considering religiosity when analyzing gender dynamics in labor markets within Muslim societies.

Keywords:

• Religiosity
• gender role attitudes
• Women’s right to work
• Muslim

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Note that adding these dummy variables could potentially introduce endogeneity issues in the regressions. It therefore serves the purpose of a robustness test only.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kurnia Sari Kasmiarno

Kurnia Sari Kasmiarno is a part-time researcher. She earned her bachelor’s degree in Islamic economics from Universitas Airlangga and her master’s degree in the same field from Universitas Gadjah Mada.

Akhmad Akbar Susamto

Akhmad Akbar Susamto is an assistant professor at the Department of Economics, Faculty of Economics and Business, Universitas Gadjah Mada. He earned his bachelor’s degree in economics and development studies from Universitas Gadjah Mada, a master’s degree in economics from Monash University, and a doctoral degree in economics from the Australian National University.