"Integration in Canada of Muslim Women Immigrants from the Middle East"

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to investigate the extent to which Muslim Middle Eastern immigrant women are integrated in Canadian society, such as in its labor force. This research examines some of the difficulties that this group of Muslim women may encounter in finding suitable occupations which may require them to register in graduate schools in order to gain Canadian credentials, and therefore fit better into the Canadian job market. The research includes both qualitative and quantitative parts. In the qualitative section, some interviews with Muslim Middle Eastern women from previous research, the notion of the veil in Islam, as well as its meanings in diaspora according to some Canadian women scholars are examined. In the quantitative section, the research results are based on PUMF (Public Use Microdata Files), of the 2001 and 2006 Censuses and for analyzing the data, SPSS was used as the statistical tool. Because of the specific research interest, a new category was created in the quantitative section; I worked with the category of Muslim immigrant women aged between 15-64 with Middle Eastern and West Asian ethnicity and birthplace. The results revealed that, although as it was mentioned mostly in qualitative data that Muslim/Muslim Middle Eastern women are discriminated against in the Canadian labor force/academia, the mentioned group of women do not necessarily suffer from a high level of underemployment. This might be partly because of the multicultural character of Canada, as well as being distanced from September 11th, 2001 event, and thus for Muslims being less stigmatized by that.