“My Parents Rejected all these Employment Opportunities”: An Intersectionality Perspective on Minoritized Gender Ideology

In the case of conservative minority women who are dependent on their families, selecting a field of study can be clarified by understanding it from an intersectionality approach underscoring their minority status, living within a family in a way that changes and manifests itself in different ways along their life-course. The weight of dependency on parents who are more conservative, a weight allowing for the inter-generational gap in conservatism to predominate the selection of field of study, is often neglected, receiving less attention. In this article we focus on Arab-Palestinian women in Israel, minority graduates of a teacher education college, as an opportunity to investigate possible inter-generational discrepancies. More specifically, the weight of these discrepancies in the development of a minoritized gender ideology; namely, the process in which a field of study and the institution of study were selected, selections that are currently reflected upon vis-â-vis employability considerations and family obligations. By studying minoritized gender ideology, we contribute the voice of an additional social location to the repertoire of diverse Muslim women’s voices. Further, we elaborate on the notion of minoritized gender ideology together with embedded agency, pointing out the salience of the temporal dimension of intersecting religion, ethnicity and gender.