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This paper aims to present a meta‐analysis of available statistical data and literature for gender‐related practices concerning women in business and education across countries, comparing the patriarchal belt and South Asian countries in the belt to the rest of the world. The purpose of the project is to investigate the progress of enhancement of opportunities for women to engage in non‐agricultural work in the belt, and, as women’s participation in tertiary education is touted as an impetus in enhancing women’s opportunities, investigate its effect.

The existence of a belt of countries from North Africa through Bangladesh and rural China is well known, with societies demonstrating a consistent pattern of restriction and suppression of women. No development of theory treating the patriarchal belt as a whole has been published. The authors earmark this as a future endeavour. They employ ten years of statistical summaries of percent of women in the non‐agricultural labour force and ratios of women to men in tertiary education provided by the United Nations in support of the UN Millennium Development Goals to compare changes in these activities in countries in the patriarchal belt, South Asia, and the rest of the world. The method is to carry out statistical comparisons of trends derived from annual averages for the two measures.

The literature review indicates that for millennia in the patriarchal belt societal practices have institutionalised women’s lack of access to participation in the labour market and generally from participating in much of public life. The analyses indicate that participation in non‐agricultural employment has decreased over the past decade in the belt compared to the rest of the world. Opportunities for women to participate in tertiary education have on average been increasing during this period for most countries of the world including those in the patriarchal belt. However, this circumstance has not led to increased participation in the non‐agricultural work force.

The practical implications seen are that the UN Millennium Development Goals (UNMDG) are important to improving the lot of individuals, some goals that purport to lead to improvements in human and gender rights in regions such as the patriarchal belt may have no real effect, and other, more useful goals need to be investigated. Economically, the exclusion of women from voluntary productive labour as detrimental to the development of a nation is seen.

In the patriarchal belt societal practices institutionalise negative discrimination concerning women, often codified in laws that prohibit women from participating in much of public life or fully competing in the labour market. The evaluation of these conditions using European and North American standards proposes that these women are abused and denied their rights. Nonetheless, initiatives such as agreements on the UNMDG appear to have no effect, and other solutions need to be pursued.

The originality and value of this paper is that it investigates the complete set of patriarchal belt countries, across countries that include both Muslim and Hindu majorities. It concludes that while religions tenets are employed to justify patriarchal practices, long‐standing tribal practices appear to be far more influential.

Research on the impact of patriarchy and patriarchal norms on women’s work-life balance is scarce. A typical patriarchal society, such as Nigeria, tends to be organised based on gender, and the construct is embedded in the culture. This paper aims to investigate the impact of patriarchy on women’s work-life balance in a non-Western context: Nigeria.

The authors adopt a qualitative research approach to enhance their insight into the issue of patriarchy and women’s work-life balance. Data for the study were collected over a four-month period, using semi-structured interviews as the primary method of data collection.

The findings of the thematic analysis reveal the impact of patriarchy on women’s work-life balance in Sub-Saharan Africa, specifically Nigeria. Women’s aspirations to achieve work-life balance in this part of the world are often frustrated by patriarchal norms, which are deeply ingrained in the culture. The findings of this study reveal that male dominance of and excessive subordination of females, domestic and gender-based division of labour and higher patriarchal proclivities among men are the ingredients of a patriarchal society. These issues make the achievement of work-life balance difficult for women.

The extent to which the findings of this research can be generalised is constrained by the limited sample size and the selected research context.

The insights gleaned from this research suggest that there are still major challenges for women in the global south, specifically Nigeria, in terms of achieving work-life balance due to the prevalent patriarchy and patriarchal norms in the society. Strong patriarchal norms and proclivity negatively affect women’s work-life balance and in turn may impact employee productivity, organisational effectiveness, employee performance and employee punctuality at work. However, an Australian “Champion of Change” initiative may be adopted to ease the patriarchal proclivity and help women to achieve work-life balance.

This paper provides valuable insights by bringing patriarchy into the discussion of work-life balance. This issue has been hitherto rare in the literature. It therefore enriches the literature on work-life balance from a patriarchal perspective.

Multiple dimensions influencing women's status in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region – factoring in socio-demographic, economic, and political forces are discussed in this paper. Process of modernization has been complicated by a strong patriarchal culture, the overlap of religion and government, and the absence of a diversified economy along with presence of wealth producing oil resources. Religious ideology, cultural beliefs, and traditional principles, however, cannot be argued as the only reason for women's status lagging behind in these countries. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Six diverse MENA countries – Iran, Libya, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen – that differ from one another with respect to geography, economy, demographics, modernization characteristics and cultural history are examined for comparative reasons.

Even though Islam is commonly portrayed as the main factor controlling women's lives and opportunities in MENA, the analysis shows that there are other significant processes at work. To date, women's higher level of educational attainment and unusually swift fertility decline in the MENA region deviates from the expectation that predicts a strong positive correlation between these demographic factors and increased women's social status and higher social mobility.

This conceptual paper demystifies the connection between women's social status and empowerment in the MENA region and its connection to economic development, employment opportunities, and political stability.

This research aims to explore how female immigrants use consumption to challenge and support their husband's position within the context of their patriarchal bargain.

The sample group (n = 20) consisted of ten first-generation Nigerian immigrant married couples living in Britain, who were interviewed together, with the married female then re-interviewed separately.

This paper demonstrates how women transition from being a wife in a consanguine family in Nigeria, which they describe as patriarchal, to becoming one within a nuclear family in the UK, a society to which they attribute gender equality. Nigerian immigrant women alter their ways of thinking and consuming, with implications to their agency and empowerment. In particular, consumption choices demonstrated the limits of these women’s willingness to challenge their patriarchal bargain and instead often colluded with their husbands to maintain his position as the head of the family.

Immigrant women should not be seen as passive receptors of their male partner’s wishes or demands, but instead active participators in purchasing and consumption decisions. Although marketing encourages direct targeting of customers, this approach raises a number of ethical issues for female African immigrants.

Previous research on the consumption behaviour of immigrants is limited in scope and tends to focus on male immigrants, with female immigrants either invisible or stereotyped. Compounding this problem are disciplinary, geographical and linguistic barriers that hinder social scientists' research into the consumption of female migration. This paper works to address these omissions.

This study adopts a narrative approach to understanding women’s life experiences from a feminist perspective. How Taiwanese women of different generations have lived their lives and what has and has not changed was investigated through a gender lens. The narrators include the author and her grandmother, born in 1975 and 1927, respectively. They each re-experience and reconfirm the markings of their pasts, psychological conditions, and bodies through deep dialogue. The two stories span approximately 50 years and manifest the patriarchal culture in Taiwanese society at different times.

This study finds that although the stories of these two women from different generations appear distinct in their own way, similar ‘dilemmas’ can be observed in their gender experiences: for example, women get married to men’s family; the value system of lineage and succession creates a tendency to expect to have boys; women need to get married to get their status recognition; and through home, women learn gender roles and gender norms.

However, the study shows progress: women’s education brings economic independence and yields a sense of accomplishment from work or school; women of different generations have different perceptions during the awakening of gender consciousness. The current findings contribute to understanding the working principles of gender relations, which reinforce the patriarchal system despite its appearance changing over time.

Studies of the representation of women in United States history textbooks, both in number and manner in which they appear, have found women are inequitably represented as compared to their male counterparts and are viewed through a patriarchal lens. This study analyzed a contemporary high school United States history textbook’s representation of women in the Progressive Era compared to an earlier edition textbook. Using their visual representation of women, it was found that the textbooks continued the patriarchal view of women and their roles in society. Although the number of representations of women had slightly increased over time, these additions did not promote a more contemporary view of women's role in history, except in the area of women's rights. Recommendations for future areas of research are made. Some are: monitoring of textbooks for equability, analyzing of textbooks covering U.S. history prior to 1877 for equability in inclusion of women in history, investigating what teachers are doing to compensate for the inequity, determining whether or not state standards are inclusive of women's history, and analyzing how women's history in college level textbooks represent women in history.

The purpose of this chapter is to trace the long-term trend of professionalization of the military and the civil–military relations of modern Korea. It reviews the patriarchal relation between the king and the military officer in ancient Korea and how the patron–client relations of a parochial society have continued between the political ruler and the military of modern Korea. The history of modern Korea is examined according to the level of development and the nature of civil–military relations. The Korean military has gradually changed from a parochial army to a professional one, and the civil–military relations of modern Korea have been normalized.

It is arguable that the central questions requiring explanation by the behavioural and social sciences are those falling under the rubric “nature vs. nurture”. To be sure, the issue is oversimplified when stated so simply; there are both physiological and environmental elements in the causation of behaviour, as well as feedback through which each alters the other. Moreover, discussions of this dichotomy can often be seen to be sterile arguments about definition, rather than answers to the empirical question of what is, in fact, happening. What matters is not “nature” or “nurture” in the abstract, but the roles physiology, environment, and the interaction of the two play in generating specific behaviour.

A strange phenomenon among women writers of the late eighteenth century, both conservative and liberal minded, was the predominance of female villains in their novels. While this can be seen as an after-effect of masculine patriarchal discourse, particularly for those women writers who possessed a more religious-based ideology, why was it prevalent among feminist writers of the time who should have been aware of misogynistic stereotypes? Two such writers who emulated this strange paradox were Mary Robinson and Charlotte Smith. Both these women had been vilified by the Anti-Jacobin British 18th press as notorious and corrupt ‘female philosophers’ who followed in the footsteps of Mary Wollstonecraft. This chapter will conduct a historical feminist close comparative reading of Robinson's novel, Walsingham, and Smith's novel, The Young Philosopher, based on feminist scholarship on eighteenth-century female writers. It will examine how the female villains in the novels overpowered even the male antagonists and were often the cause behind the misfortunes, directly or indirectly, of the heroines/heroes. While these villains did serve as warnings against inappropriate behaviour, they illustrated the disaster for women when there is a lack of female community. Specifically, in the case of Robinson, her Sadean villains illustrated that no one is spared from the corruption of power and that the saintly female figure is nothing but an illusion of the male imagination. They were fallen Lucifers, rebels who relished in their freedom and power despite their damnation and punishment. The patriarchal system was temporarily demolished by them.