Abstract
This paper argues that a thorough discussion on women’s rights needs to go beyond progress in civil and political rights. Looking comparatively at Iran and Turkey, it posits that the legal and political context of secularism v. theocracy has much less of an impact than expected, and suggests that other variables offer much more compelling explanations. The paper combines feminist constructivist insights with the broader lens of world -system theory to hypothesize that the explanation for women‘s inequality in employment is found at the intersection of endogenous gender constructions heavily influenced by culture and religion, and of an international economic order that contributes to the reproduction of a patriarchal structure in poorer countries, regardless of their political system
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