Although Palestine ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) in 2014 without reservations, women’s labour-force participation has remained largely stagnant over the past fifteen years, fluctuating between 16% and 20%, raising critical questions about the operational effectiveness of international gender-equality commitments. Focusing on Article 11 of CEDAW, this study adopts a mixed-methods design that integrates administrative labour-force statistics, a survey of 529 economically active women, and qualitative evidence from key-informant interviews, legal texts, and policy documents. Quantitative findings reveal a systematic divergence between symbolic awareness of CEDAW and actionable knowledge of Article 11, with substantially higher levels of informed awareness among respondents engaged through authoritative institutional or civil-society channels. Qualitative evidence further demonstrates that labour-market reforms associated with Article 11 have been uneven and selective, constrained by weak enforcement capacity, fragmented institutional coordination, and employer cost-avoidance practices, particularly in the private sector. Taken together, the findings indicate that CEDAW ratification in Palestine has functioned primarily as a normative anchor rather than as an operational driver of labour-market transformation. By situating these findings within the Sustainable Development Goals framework, the study contributes to SDG 5 (Gender Equality) and SDG 8 (Decent Work) by demonstrating how rights awareness and enforcement credibility condition women’s employment outcomes, while highlighting the central role of institutional coordination and civil-society mediation in line with SDG 17. The study advances debates on treaty implementation by showing that, in fragile governance contexts, progress toward gender-equality targets depends less on formal legal adoption and more on the institutional pathways through which rights are translated into practice.
Hannoon et al. (Sat,) studied this question.