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Who decides how to rank Arab women?

A recent report by Thomson Reuters ranking Arab women is laden with Western cultural stereotypes of Arabs.
Women shout slogans against the government and members of the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafists during a protest against the absence of a women parliamentary quota in the constitution and to demand more women rights in front of the Shura Council in Cairo November 13, 2013. According to a Thomson Reuters Foundation poll on 22 Arab states, Egypt emerged as the worst country to be a woman in the Arab world today, followed closely by Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Egypt scored badly in almost every category, including g

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.”

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