Comment is Free Andrew Brown 14/07/2009

Why don't Muslim women work outside the home? The Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslim communities in this country contain many of the poorest and least employed women in Britain. Why are they both poor and unemployed? Is it racism, or religion, or some combination of the two?

A report from the Quilliam Foundation dismisses both these simple answers and suggests some complex and worrying ones. The statistic that really jumped out at me was the extent to which marriage has become a means of immigration to this country. A study by Professor Angela Dale, of Manchester University, cited here suggests that 50% of Pakistani and Bangladeshi women and 40% of men in this country married spouses from overseas between 1998 and 2005. It seems reasonable to suppose that most of these women come from poor, rural families, and those are exactly the ones with the highest rates of female exclusion from the job market here.

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