Arab women are increasingly present in public life, contrary to widespread misconceptions about the region. This is at least what Youssef Courbage, research director at the French National Institute for Demographic Studies (INED), contends. The combined effects of delayed marriages, high enrollment rates in universities, access to contraception and decreased fertility (i.e., the number of children per women) has led to the emergence of women from the family sphere and entry into the labor market and politics.

In an interview with Al-Monitor, Courbage dated this evolution to the early 1970s. He cited Morocco as a case in point, where the percentage of single women in the 30-34 age bracket has soared from 5% in the late 1960s to 33% today. Likewise, traditional marriages that often involve marrying into a clan or tribe continue to plummet, from 30% in 1995 to 15% today. Female political participation is best exemplified in Tunisia, where women represent more than 31% of members of parliament, up from 28% in 2011. By way of comparison, a mere 18% of national legislature seats are held by women in the United States and 27% in France.

According to preliminary results of the Oct. 26 parliamentary election, Tunisia’s parliament boasts 68 female members of parliament, of which 35 hail from the liberal, secular party Nidaa Tunis and 27 from the moderate Islamist party Ennahda. Tunisia is reaping the fruits of a progressive electoral code, which was revised in the wake of the Arab Spring.

“We fought to have male-female parity in the 2011 electoral law,” Faiza Skandrani, who heads Tunisia’s organization for equality and parity (Association pour l’Egalité et la Parité), told Al-Monitor. She remembered that surprisingly enough Islamists from Ennahda were sometimes more in favor of gender parity than democratic parties. Skandrani said the main challenge back in 2011 was to convince political parties that there were indeed apt female politicians. “Often at time, men in political parties said they wouldn’t be able to find suitable female candidates. So we traveled the country and collected the resumes of perfectly able women to prove them wrong.” Her organization also trained female candidates in political communications and lobbying.