The Political Gender Gap in Afghanistan

Abstract

Women’s empowerment has become a salient issue in nation building in recent times. The need to secure basic human rights may well be at the core of the attention, but development experts appear to have recognized the core role of women in family and community well-being in developing countries and are beginning to tout the importance of women’s empowerment in all the aspects of development policies as reflected in the European Union’s Millennium Development Goals. This study explores political gender differences in Afghanistan, a Muslim country of extensive gender differentiation. The gender disparities we observe are not what one might have expected. Men outperform women only in those specific areas where the prohibitive structural and social limitations placed on women by the larger Afghan society would predict. We contend that these gaps would attenuate as Afghanistan’s nascent democracy deepens and extends more freedoms to Afghan women.

KEYWORDS:

• Afghanistan
• gender gap
• political gender gap
• Muslim women
• democratization

Notes

1. The definition of “public” is both slippery and important when speaking about politicization of women generally (Schlozman et al. 1995; Verba, Burns, and Schlozman 1997) and in traditional societies in particular (Van Allen 1976). Afghanistan is a unique situation in that we are not merely speaking about women’s activities that are being dismissed as apolitical as we are about restrictions that prevent women’s engagement altogether.

2. Steven Hofmann (2004) found mixed results among men and women in four predominately Muslim countries; men had more positive assessments of democracy in Azerbaijan and Turkey, whereas the opposite was true in Bosnia and Bangladesh.

3. The literature of survey research would raise the specter of socially acceptable responses when men interview men and women interview women. We have no way of determining to what extent such socially acceptable responses are embedded in the data. We also cannot account for response differences attributable to the war environment. But there have been several other public opinion polls conducted in Afghanistan: Charney Research (March 2004); ABC News (October 2005); ABC News/BBC World Service (October 2006); Center for Policy and Human Development [United Nations Human Development Program] (2007); Glevum Associates (July 2009); International Republican Institute (July 2009); and Washington Post/ABC News/BBC/ARD TV-Germany (from October 29 to November 13, 2010). Finally, The Asia Foundation completed its sixth survey in the series at the end of 2010. Afghans are used to these surveys and that should minimize issues associated with socially acceptable responses and other matters that could impact responses to these survey questions.

4. While there is no consensus on what this question measures (Canache, Mondak, and Seligson 2001), we use it as a diffuse measure of system support rather than support for democracy per se.

5. The survey questions used in this analysis contained dichotomous as well as Likert-scale response categories. Because we found no commonalities among the five issue areas and were left with estimating single equations, we made the decision to collapse the scaled responses into dichotomies and use binary logistic for all the models. At this stage in Afghanistan’s development we are more interested in the intensity of the responses rather than the degree of movement on the Likert-scale variables.

6. Intra-Pashtun rivalries exist (e.g., Duranni versus non-Duranni clans), but for the purposes of this analysis, treat them as a single entity. Moreover, because the Pashtuns represent the largest group in the population coupled with their historical importance in the power structure, we decided to use them as the reference category for ethnicity.

7. The urban/rural distinction in Afghanistan is not as clear as in Western industrialized countries. However, our categorization is not arbitrary. It is based on Afghanistan’s formal classifications used in national development projects and distribution of foreign aid. The decades-old instability in the country caused many to flee to safer environs. It is estimated that after the fall of the Taliban, over 5 million people returned to the country, many of whom may have settled in the urban areas (Majidi 2011).

8. The survey data did not include a measure of religiosity (i.e., one’s level of adherence to faith). However, there was a question about religious affiliation, to which approximately 88 percent responded Sunni, 11 percent Shi’a, and 0.3 percent Ismaeli, another sect of Islam (these numbers accord with CIA World FactBook’s estimates of 80 percent Sunni, 19 percent Shi’a, and 1 percent other). Thus, the respondents, in accordance with Afghanistan’s population distribution, were Muslim. We did not uncover any literature or theoretical ground to anticipate Muslim inter-sect differences in the social treatment of women. Indeed, what we found (e.g., Ferdows 1985) suggests no sect differences in gender social treatment. Nevertheless, we have incorporated a control for Muslim Sect within the models.