Who decides how to rank Arab women?
A recent report by Thomson Reuters ranking Arab women is laden with Western cultural stereotypes of Arabs.
It took Western media a few weeks after the toppling of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to bring up the question of women’s rights in relation to the Arab revolutions. The question is certainly not innocent considering the deployment of women’s issues in war propaganda and the presumed image of Arabs as incapable of intellectual revolutions that can bring about values of equality and freedom, presuming these values exist elsewhere.
The recent poll by the Thomson Reuters Foundation does not diverge from this discourse. On social media, women and men have been debating the methodology and outcomes of the poll. Although the status of Arab women did not witness any significant developments, a critique to this report is necessary to highlight how problematic these polls are, particularly when measured on “human rights.”
The report claims to have relied on the answers of "336 gender experts." The criteria of selecting these “experts” are not known and the names of those involved are not disclosed. I was myself contacted to take part of the poll, but did not find the questions of any use as they relied on one understanding of a good status for women and expressed interest in one type of woman for the poll.
I did not find stateless and migrant women in Kuwait of importance to the poll, just as issues of a cultural and religious nature were of more importance than institutional ones. Hence, Kuwait is ranked the third best after Comoros and Oman, perhaps due to the lack of information and participants in the poll, and not necessarily for factual reasons.
