Driven out: women’s employment, the transport sector and social reproduction in Grand Tunis

Abstract

Employment in the transport sector has historically proven to be male-dominated, even in countries like Tunisia which have evidenced public policy narratives and legal employment frameworks promoting gender equality. This paper presented the findings from a grounded research study examining women’s employment experiences in blue-collar roles in the transport sector of Greater Tunis. Drawing on extensive interviews with both female and male transport employees, as well as field observations, it demonstrates that familiar sectoral narratives of transport work as ‘too rough, too hard and too dirty for women’ can be understood through the broader political economy of the country and the transport sector within it. The research evidences the sustained and mutually-constitutive relationship between patriarchal cultural norms and capital’s development through successive periods of populist welfarism and neo-liberal governance, indicating that progressive advances in women's employment rights are not socio-economically embedded and suggesting that future research would be usefully informed by feminist social reproduction theory.