Employment of Palestinian Refugee Women in Lebanon: Opportunities and Hurdles

Abstract

For over 65 years, protracted Palestinian refugees have been largely excluded from participating in the Lebanese labour market and rare are the studies that examined the socio-economic implications of such exclusion. This article is concerned with how the lack of rights for the Palestinian graduate women affects their (un)employment status. It will use data from a tracer survey among 201 young graduated Palestinian women who received the Scholarship Fund for Palestinian Refugee Women in Lebanon, as well as secondary data from the International Labour Organization and the American University of Beirut/United Nations Relief and Works Agency surveys. Our findings reveal that, first, the better is education for Palestinian women, the more likely they are to be employed; second, while State exclusionary policies have not been successful at completely barring Palestinian women from participating in the Lebanese labour market this participation took the form of segregation into low-paid segments of the Lebanese economy and into black labour market where work conditions are very harsh.