Breaking Barriers : Understanding and Addressing Social Norm Constraints to Women's Work in the Middle East and North Africa

This policy brief uses data from those efforts to document the role social norms play to support (or hinder) female labor force participation in a sample of MENA countries. Data was collected in Egypt, the Republic of Iraq, Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI), Jordan, Morocco, and Tunisia between 2018 and 2024 covering beliefs and social expectations of men and women across a range of FLFP-related norms. Results discuss which social norms are more or less supportive of FLFP and how strongly they predict women's labor market outcomes, where misperceived norms may be influencing behavior, and how these beliefs and expectations vary across different demographic groups, including at the intrahousehold level