Gender Equality in Tunisia: Current Trends

Tunisia has come a long way towards achieving gender equality and remains a prominent example to other Arab countries in this experience. Meanwhile, Tunisia still takes only modest positions in international rankings on various indexes measuring gender gap. This work examines, with the help of a comparative-historical method, the formation of the women's movement in Tunisia and the development of legislation on gender equality. Then, through statistical data the author outlines the extent of women's economic, social, and political participation, and, finally, referring to the "concept of representation" by Hanna F. Pitkin (1967), the author looks at the pre-election programs of political parties that won the 2019 parliamentary elections, in order to assess the perception of the problem of women's emancipation in Tunisian society on the whole. As a result of the research, the author comes to the conclusion that, despite progressive legislative framework guaranteeing women's rights, the mass consciousness of Tunisians maintains a set of ideas and norms on gender inequality generated by Islamic tradition and fostering the discrepancy, first in the existing legislation and the objective reality, and secondly, between the rules of family law containing elements of Sharia, and the provisions of the Constitution, as well as the accepted international obligations.