The Gender Contract under Neoliberalism: Palestinian-Israeli Women's Labor Force Participation
探讨新自由主义背景下巴勒斯坦裔以色列女性劳动力参与率低的原因，指出基础设施不足、歧视性政策与经济私有化之间的矛盾期望，以及性别契约向市场主导转型的悖论效应。
This paper interprets the pressure to raise Palestinian-Israeli women’s labor force participation within the unfolding neoliberal project in Israel, arguing that women’s stalled workforce integration reflects embedded economic rationality. Poor infrastructure and discriminatory policies, combined with Israel’s rapid economic privatization, set contradictory expectations for Palestinian-Israeli women: their opportunity-cost calculations include entitlements to economic protection alongside obligations to provide expenditure-saving domestic labor. Yet growing pressure and desire to join the paid workforce suggest that the gender contract may be changing. This cultural schema, which links women’s economic strategizing to their sense of feminine propriety, is transforming as part of a broader transition to a market-led gender regime, with the paradoxical effect of encouraging women’s employment while simultaneously impoverishing them. By dwelling on the dialectics of culture and the structure of work opportunities, and women’s agency, this paper aims to resolves an impasse in the current debate on women’s low workforce participation.