On Wednesday, February 21, Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs held an event to discuss the impact of dictatorship on women, particularly in the Middle East. The main event, titled “Female Political Representation Under Authoritarianism“, featured a lecture by comparative politics expert Marwa M. Shalaby. Here is the description provided on the event announcement page:

The Arab world has one of the lowest rates of women’s political representation at 17 percent, compared to 40 percent in Nordic countries and 27 percent in both Europe and the Americas. Whereas previous explanations for women’s political underrepresentation in the region has mostly focused on socio-economic and cultural factors, our understanding of the effect of the existing autocratic structures on women’s access to political power continues to be fairly limited.

Little or no scholarly attention was paid to the impact of the politics of authoritarianism on shaping not only women’s numerical presence in national legislatures (i.e., descriptive representation), but also, their legislative behavior and policy priorities once in office (i.e., substantive representation). The talk will shed light on some of these aspects while explicating the dynamics of women’s membership in legislative committees across the MENA region.

Marwa M. Shalaby has an interesting background. According to her bio at Rice University’s James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy:

Marwa Shalaby, Ph.D., is a fellow for the Middle East and director of the Women’s Rights in the Middle East Program. Her research is in the field of comparative politics and research methodology, with a concentration on Middle Eastern politics, gender politics and democratization. Her ongoing research investigates the dynamics of female political representation in the MENA region. Her work is supported by the Women’s Rights in the Middle East Endowment, the Boniuk Institute and the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy at the American University of Beirut.

Shalaby is currently working on a book manuscript exploring female political representation under authoritarian systems. She has published extensively on gender and politics in the Middle East. Her current work focuses on the effect of autocratic rule, electoral laws and other institutional arrangements on shaping not only women’s access to power, but also their legislative behavior in Arab parliaments.

Shalaby graduated with honors from Al-Azhar University in Cairo, one of the most prestigious institutions in the Middle East, with a bachelor of arts. She also studied at the American University in Cairo and the Sorbonne in Paris before heading to the United States to earn her doctorate from the University of Houston.

The video is about 90 minutes long. Take a look: