Sexism in Israel

Israel's formal commitment to gender equality dates to the state's founding documents. The Declaration of Independence, adopted in 1948, promised "complete equality of social and political rights" regardless of religion, race, or sex.[6] The 1951 Women's Equal Rights Law was an early post-state effort to codify that promise, though scholars have noted that the law was interpreted narrowly for decades: all 21 Supreme Court cases citing it between 1952 and 2015 concerned family matters, reflecting a legal culture that treated women primarily as wives, daughters, and mothers rather than as full citizens.[3]

Israel does not have a single-document constitution. The 1992 Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty, which gave constitutional weight to many civil rights, does not expressly include equality among its protections, though courts have interpreted the broader legal framework as securing gender equality as a basic principle of the legal system.[7] Laws on inheritance, transmission of citizenship, and the minimum age of marriage do not distinguish by gender, and employment law prohibits discrimination on grounds including sex and pregnancy while providing for equal pay for equal work.[6][8]

The legislative record on gender includes several milestone enactments. The 1991 Domestic Violence Prevention Law empowered family courts to issue protective orders. The 1998 Sexual Harassment Prevention Law defined sexual harassment as a criminal offense and enabled civil suits against perpetrators and their employers. That same year, the Authority for the Advancement of Women was established by law to coordinate and monitor government and local-authority activity, promote legislation, advise on enforcement, initiate research, and raise public awareness.[9] A 2020 amendment to equal-pay legislation subsequently required companies with more than 518 employees to publish gender pay-gap reports for the first time, with the first reports submitted on June 1, 2022.[8]

The Knesset created a Committee on the Status of Women and Gender Equality in 1992 to help ensure the 1951 law was upheld.[3] Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs further describes the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission as an ombudsman for workplace discrimination, with authority to investigate complaints involving gender, pregnancy, fertility treatments, and parenthood, and to bring legal action against employers that violate anti-discrimination laws.[10]

Despite this statutory architecture, scholarly analysis has highlighted an enduring tension between formal equality and practice. A study of the discourse underlying the 1949 Defense Service Law and the 1951 Women's Equal Rights Law argues that both framed Jewish-Israeli women primarily as mothers and wives, and that motherhood was constructed as a role of national significance, connecting the definition of female citizenship to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the centrality of family and military service in national culture.[11]

A parallel analysis situates what it calls a "myth of gender equality" against the reality of women's concentration in care roles even in institutions, such as the kibbutz, that projected egalitarian values. Kibbutzim remained gendered, male-oriented, and male-dominated communities, with women associated with child care, laundry, cooking, teaching, and nursing rather than production or leadership.[12]

Advocacy for women's rights in the Jewish community of Mandatory Palestine predates statehood. Rosa Welt-Strauss helped found and lead the Union of Hebrew Women for Equal Rights in Eretz Yisrael in 1919, advocating women's voting rights and leadership roles.[3] Women's suffrage in the Jewish community became a central nation-building issue between 1917 and 1926, even as barriers to equal political citizenship persisted after suffrage was achieved.[13]

The Western liberal feminist movements of the 1960s largely left Israel untouched. The first Israeli radical women's movement is dated to 1972, and the 1973 Yom Kippur War sharpened awareness of gendered divisions of labor and civic roles.[14] Feminist organizing intensified through the late 1970s, and what became known as Mizrahi feminism emerged as a major shift in the late 1970s and 1980s.

Research on the Israeli feminist movement identifies a significant rift over ethnic representation: liberal feminist ideas arrived in Israel in the 1970s, but Mizrahi women involved in feminist activity later described being excluded and marginalized by Ashkenazi women who dominated the movement. The 1995 First Mizrahi Feminist Annual Conference in Netanya gave public expression to that divide, and scholars have examined how universalist language such as "sisterhood" could fail to benefit women across ethnic groups.[15] By the late 1990s, identity-politics divisions had become a defining feature of the movement, and the twenty-first-century feminist landscape has been described as expanded but still highly fragmented.[14]

Women's advocacy organizations succeeded in promoting feminist legislation during the late 1980s and 1990s even as the legal system as a whole lagged behind the feminist movement in important areas. Feminist thinking found expression in Supreme Court decisions by both men and women justices, including in Shakdiel v. Minister for Religious Affairs (1988), Nevo v. National Labour Court (1990), and Miller v. Minister of Defence (1995), while lawyers who explicitly identified as feminists could face professional disadvantage and discrimination.[16]

Women's presence in the Knesset has followed an uneven trajectory marked by prolonged underrepresentation and partial, reversible gains. Between 1961 and 1999, the number of women members never exceeded 12, or 10 percent of the 120-seat chamber. Between 1999 and 2015 the figure rose from 14 to 29; it subsequently reached 36 seats, or 30 percent, following the retirement of several male members during the 20th Knesset, before falling again to 29 after the 2019 election.[1] The 2022 election brought a further drop from 35 members to 29, while the 35-member cabinet formed after that election included six women.[17] The Israeli government's Beijing+30 report recorded 30 women, or 25 percent, among the 120 Knesset members as of March 2024.[18]

Women's underrepresentation has been especially pronounced in the most influential legislative roles. By the dissolution of the 20th Knesset, only one of the 15 Finance Committee members was a woman, and throughout the Knesset's history no more than three women had simultaneously chaired permanent committees. Of the 17 people who had served as Knesset Plenum chairperson, all but one were men.[1] In 2017, women held 19 percent of ministerial and deputy-ministerial roles, compared with an OECD average of 27.9 percent, placing Israel 28th of 35 OECD countries assessed and 100th of 188 countries in an Inter-Parliamentary Union ranking.[1]

An August 2023 assessment found 6 women and 26 men among 32 government ministers, 2 women among 32 directors-general, 1 woman among 10 security-political cabinet members, and 2 women among 11 members of the Ministerial Committee on Legislative Matters.[5] In 2023, a petition by women's-rights NGOs challenged the appointment of 28 men and only two women to director-general positions in government ministries; on June 28 of that year, the Supreme Court ordered the government to explain why it had not issued guidelines for appropriate representation of women in public-service positions, and the petition remained pending at year's end.[17]

Barriers operate at the party level as well as in cabinet formation. For the 2019 election, the two largest parties' lists had no women in their top five positions, and after a party merger, Miri Regev was the only woman in the largest party's top ten. Some parties used reserved places for women, but women who performed well in primaries were sometimes moved down lists, ostensibly to prevent the number elected from exceeding a reserved quota.[1] The ultra-Orthodox parties Shas and United Torah Judaism have refused to admit women to their candidate lists; only one Haredi woman had ever been elected to the Knesset as of the 2019 reporting. A Supreme Court ruling required United Torah Judaism to allow female representation, but a party member was quoted as expecting no change for decades.[1]

The 2009 election brought 21 women to the 18th Knesset, or 17.5 percent, with the combined Arab lists returning one woman among 11 members and the ultra-Orthodox parties including no women.[19] A 2012 Israeli Democracy Index survey found that 64.9 percent of respondents considered the claim that "men make better political leaders than women" to be incorrect, and 63.8 percent supported a proposal requiring at least one-third of a party's list to be women as a condition for state funding.[20]

The structural disadvantages shaping women's political prospects extend beyond party lists. Israel's security-focused political culture has been identified as a factor, with former generals and men perceived as security experts seen as having advantages in political competition, while women are underrepresented in combat roles and excluded from many elite IDF units.[1] Women also earn less on average, are more likely to lack broad professional networks, and face greater pressure to prioritize caregiving, all constraints identified as reducing the pool of women prepared to seek office.[1]

At the local level, after Israel's 2024 local elections, women led 15 of 257 local authorities, about 6 percent, and made up about 20 percent of local council members, up from about 11 percent in 2008 and 13 percent in 2013.[21] Approximately one-third of the authorities examined by the State Comptroller had no women elected to their councils at all.[21]

Multiple sources document a substantial and persistent wage gap between women and men in Israel, though the precise figure varies by year, sector, and the measure used. A 2019 analysis reported that women earned, on average, 35 percent less than male colleagues.[1] Government statistics cited in the U.S. State Department's 2022 report recorded a 32 percent pay gap in the public sector for 2019, with part of the gap attributed to differences in average weekly hours worked.[8]

Jerusalem Institute for Policy Research figures based on the Central Bureau of Statistics' 2018 Household Expenses Survey gave women's gross monthly income in Israel overall as 68 percent of men's, or NIS 8,550 for women against NIS 12,500 for men, while men worked more hours per week on average, 45 versus 37 nationally.[22] A Ynet report on 2018 income data gave average monthly income of NIS 14,206 for men and NIS 9,679 for women, a reported gap of 32 percent, and identified 60 percent of the gap as attributable to differences in employment volume and 30 percent to differences in industry, with 10 percent remaining after those adjustments.[23] The same report described a 28 percent "motherhood penalty" in wages following the birth of a first child, persisting over the following decade.[23]

A 2024 study using PIAAC data reported that Israel's gender wage gap was almost the highest among OECD countries in 2021, identifying differences in hours worked, numeracy skills, and the use of numeracy at work as major explanatory factors.[24] The authors argued that efforts to narrow the gap should include encouraging women to take full-time jobs and encouraging girls to pursue more advanced STEM courses.[24]

Women's educational attainment has outpaced men's without translating into equal labor-market outcomes. Women's share of first-degree students in Israeli higher education rose from 46.9 percent in 1969–70 to 56.6 percent in 2012–13, while women's share of doctoral students rose from 32 percent in 1980 to 52.1 percent in 2012–13. Yet for 2012, men's average gross monthly salary was NIS 11,400 against NIS 7,600 for women.[25]

Labor-force participation differs markedly across ethnic and religious communities. The government's Beijing+30 report recorded that in 2022 approximately 42 percent of Arab women were employed, compared with 74 percent of Arab men; employment proportions for non-ultra-Orthodox Jewish women were approximately 83 percent and for ultra-Orthodox Jewish women approximately 79 percent. The employment proportion for Bedouin women in the main working ages was 21 percent in 2019.[18] Barriers identified for Arab women specifically included limited local employment opportunities, insufficient subsidized childcare, public-transportation gaps, educational and Hebrew-language barriers, and the continuing role of women as primary caregivers.[18]

Wage disparities were also documented in local government by a 2024 State Comptroller audit: women made up about 74 percent of local-government employees but only about 26 percent of senior officials, and women's average monthly salary in local government was about 69 percent of men's in 2022. In seven examined local authorities, reported gender salary disparities ranged from about 14 percent in Kfar Sava to about 42 percent in Gan Yavne, driven by occupational segregation, underrepresentation in senior management, and differences in professional rank, seniority, and overtime.[21] The audit also found that 92 of 194 authorities responding to its questionnaire had not conducted internal gender-pay-gap assessments in 2021 and 2022, and recommended a structured monitoring and enforcement framework.[21]

In Israel's high-technology sector, women made up 33.5 percent of jobs as of a 2025 report by the Israel Innovation Authority, a proportion that had changed little in three decades even as the absolute number of women employed in the sector had risen 65 percent over the previous decade to about 130,000.[26] Women held 17 percent of senior-management positions in private high-tech companies and 24.3 percent of management roles in public companies, and were 10 percent of startup chief executives. Women-led companies received 4.3 percent of capital raised in recent years, and 40 percent of venture-capital firms in Israel had no female partner.[26] Women's share of students in high-tech-related academic programs rose from 24 percent in 2012 to 32 percent in 2023, while women made up 26.5 percent of the R&D workforce.[26]

A 2014 survey by the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission found that 60 percent of women who contacted the Commission complained of workplace discrimination connected to childbirth and raising children, during pregnancy, fertility treatment, or parenthood. In a separate employer survey, 25 percent of participating employers said women earned less than men in their workplaces, and 41 percent said they preferred not to hire Arab mothers.[27]

Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics compared 59 quality-of-life indicators for 2022 by sex: women had better results on 16, men on 23, and results were equal on 20. In employment quality, men had better results on most measures. On the CBS's ratio-based gender-gap measure, the indicator for harm from sexual harassment showed an 85 percent gap against women, compared with 71 percent in 2021, and men's employment rate in information and communications technology was 48 percent higher than women's.[28]

Marriage and divorce in Israel are governed through religious personal-status systems rather than a unified civil-marriage system, producing gender asymmetries that affect Jewish, Muslim, and other communities differently.[7][29] Civil marriage is not available under Israeli law.[29] For Jewish citizens, marriage and divorce fall under the jurisdiction of the rabbinical courts, which apply Orthodox halachic standards.

Under Jewish religious law, a divorce requires that the husband grant a document known as a get. Either spouse may initiate proceedings, but both must consent for the divorce to take effect.[17] A husband may make his consent conditional on demands about property ownership or child custody, leaving his wife unable to remarry, sometimes for years. Children she bore with another man would be deemed illegitimate by the rabbinate absent a valid get.[17] Rabbinical courts have sometimes punished husbands who refused to grant a get but also acknowledged lacking authority under religious law to grant one without the husband's agreement.[8] A woman trapped in this situation is known as an agunah, a term meaning "chained woman." A 2008 academic article cited estimates of approximately 5,000 agunot in Israel.[30]

A qualitative study of agunah activists and Israeli rabbinic-court rulings finds that both religious-feminist activists and conservative judges framed their actions as serving the collective and the Jewish family, and describes divorce disputes as entangling national, gender, and religious politics simultaneously.[31]

For Muslim citizens, a different legal asymmetry applies: a Muslim man may divorce without his wife's consent or a court petition, while a Muslim woman may obtain a divorce through sharia courts without her husband's consent only under certain conditions or as provided in her marriage contract.[17]

The UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, in its 2017 concluding observations, raised concern about discrimination against women in marriage and divorce under religious personal-status laws, discussed the get requirement, and recommended changes to discriminatory divorce provisions and consideration of civil marriage and divorce options.[29] Legal scholar Ruth Halperin-Kaddari argued that family law placed women at a structural disadvantage because they could be refused a divorce and might have to "buy their personal freedom with money," affecting their economic position and power within the family.[32]

Pressure toward gender segregation in public spaces, driven largely by ultra-Orthodox religious norms, has produced recurring legal and social conflict. Israeli courts have generally ruled against coerced segregation, but enforcement has been contested.[5][33]

Gender separation on public buses serving primarily ultra-Orthodox communities became a sustained controversy. A 2012 Ynet report described the Supreme Court's 2011 ruling as permitting voluntary separation on such routes, provided passengers could sit wherever they chose and drivers intervened when someone was prevented from doing so. Ministry of Transport data recorded about 4,250 inspections on routes where separation occurred in 2011, including 1,150 inspections in which inspectors deliberately sat in a section considered the "wrong" one; 56 inspectors were asked to move, and 15 moved because they felt threatened.[33] Ministry officials described the separation as voluntary, while the Reform Center for Religion and State and a police representative disputed that assessment, arguing that coercion persisted.[33] A 2025 report characterized the same ruling as prohibiting any gender separation on Israeli bus routes, while also recording that complaints about women being ordered to move to the rear continued after the ruling.[34]

The State Department's 2023 human-rights report recorded a specific incident on August 13, when a bus driver ordered teenage girls to separate from male friends, sit at the back of the bus, and cover themselves with blankets.[17] On September 22 of the same year, the Supreme Court reaffirmed a Tel Aviv municipality condition that a public Yom Kippur eve prayer gathering organized by Rosh Yehudi could proceed only without gender separation; Rosh Yehudi nonetheless attempted to segregate participants on September 25, provoking an altercation with residents.[17]

In ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods, "modesty signs" demanding that women cover themselves remained posted in Beit Shemesh despite a 2018 court order to remove them, and photographs of women were regularly defaced in cities with large ultra-Orthodox populations. Some companies chose to self-censor advertisements rather than risk vandalism.[8] An ultra-Orthodox news website apologized and paid compensation to five women leaders of progressive Judaism movements after blurring women in a photograph of a meeting with President Herzog.[8]

An August 2023 INSS assessment described government actions and proposals that its authors considered harmful to women's equality, including ending a campaign to encourage women to participate in local elections, approving a bill to replace the independent Authority for the Advancement of the Status of Women with a body subordinate to a minister, deciding that Civil Service Commission documents would use exclusively masculine language, and proposing an exemption from service-provider anti-discrimination rules on religious grounds. The authors said the exemption could allow a woman considered "immodestly" dressed to be denied service.[5]

The INSS authors also identified proposals or moves concerning gender separation in national parks and nature reserves, and incidents in which women were refused permission to board buses because they were women or because of their dress.[5]

Israel's Prohibition of Discrimination in Products, Services and Entry to Places of Entertainment and Public Places Law was enacted following cases involving discrimination on grounds including gender.[35] A proposed amendment would permit gender-separated cultural or educational events for religious groups, which an INSS analysis argued could enable group-based discrimination.[35] The Justice Ministry's Anti-Racism Unit received 458 complaints in 2021, one quarter concerning discrimination in the provision of services; the INSS used this figure to argue for continued anti-discrimination protection.[35]

A CBS survey found that 11 percent of women in Israel felt they had experienced discrimination because of their sex, with the proportion rising to 18 percent among women aged 20–29 and 16 percent among those aged 30–39.[36]

Women have served in the Israel Defense Forces since its establishment in 1948, making the IDF one of the few armies in the world to conscript women.[4] In its early decades, women were assigned to roles characterized as "feminine," including office work, nursing, and teaching. New roles opened after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, primarily to free men for combat assignments. The landmark 1995 case of Alice Miller resulted in the High Court of Justice ruling that women had a right to equality in military service both formally and in practice, requiring the IDF to open its pilots' course to women.[4]

As of the period covered by the Jewish Women's Archive's sources, women made up about 40 percent of conscript soldiers and 25 percent of the officer corps.[4] CEDAW's 2017 observations raised concern about reports of sexual harassment in the IDF and inadequate sanctions, and recommended intensified efforts against harassment in the military.[29] A 2008 account described an IDF program called Working It Through, intended to help female soldiers advance in male-dominated technological fields and combat units.[30]

Women's underrepresentation in combat roles and elite IDF units has been identified as a factor disadvantaging women in broader Israeli society, particularly in political competition, where former senior military officers, almost exclusively men, have traditionally enjoyed an advantage in projecting security credibility.[1]

Twenty-two women and girls were killed by partners or other family members in Israel during 2023, according to the Israel Observatory on Femicide as cited in the U.S. State Department's 2023 human-rights report; half of the victims were Jewish and approximately two-fifths were Arab.[17] The same report stated that more than 200,000 women lived in situations of domestic violence.[17]

A law approved by the Knesset on July 30, 2023, and due to take effect in 2024, was designed to allow courts to approve electronic monitoring of men to enforce protection orders. Women's-rights NGOs welcomed the legislation but said it had been significantly watered down and questioned its effectiveness.[17]

Historical estimates cited in a 2008 academic article, drawing on the Israel Women's Network's 2006 annual report, recorded that more than 33 percent of women were said to have experienced sexual attacks, one in five to have experienced rape, and 75 percent of rape survivors to have been attacked by someone they knew.[30] The 1998 Sexual Harassment Prevention Law defined sexual harassment as a criminal offense and made civil suits available against perpetrators and their employers.[9]

As of 2008, a network of responses to women's issues included rape-crisis centers, shelters for battered women, hotlines, and police and medical personnel trained to respond to reports of family violence and abuse, as well as community-center assertiveness programs.[30] On the CBS's ratio-based measure, the indicator for harm from sexual harassment showed an 85 percent gender gap against women in 2022, compared with 71 percent in 2021.[28]

Representations of women in Israeli advertising, news, and entertainment have been described as reflecting and perpetuating gender marginality. Recurring portrayals through narrow beauty standards, hyper-sexualization, victimhood, and domination by men have been identified as persistent patterns, alongside a gradual diversification over time to include women in varied professional roles and as empowered, sexually independent figures.[37] The overall conclusion drawn by analysts of Israeli media is that gender inequity persists and women continue to be marginalized, even as the range of representations has widened.[37]

Gender inequality in Israel does not follow a single pattern across communities, and research has documented distinct dynamics among ultra-Orthodox, Arab, Druze, and other populations.

Ultra-Orthodox women have entered Israel's high-tech labor market in meaningful numbers, but a 2018 study of 119 women computer programmers in that community described a dual employment pattern: those working in segregated organizations and those in assimilative ones faced differing trade-offs involving pay, job satisfaction, commitment, and burnout, with professional and social conflicts accentuated in assimilative workplaces.[38] The intersection of gender, religiosity, and class shaped women's trajectories throughout.

For Palestinian-Arab mothers in Israel, a qualitative study based on interviews with 28 women during the COVID-19 lockdown found that while the period introduced some challenges to traditional gender roles, practices that reproduced those roles ultimately prevailed and gender inequalities intensified. Increased time at home did not produce a more equal division of household work, underscoring the influence of cultural models on domestic arrangements.[39]

Among Druze women, a 2024 study based on interviews with 24 educated professionals employed in engineering, medicine, and law identified three household patterns: ten women described an egalitarian division of roles, six a reversal of roles, and eight a traditional division that required sacrificing career ambitions for family. The authors found that women's entry into nontraditional professions was increasingly recognized and valued within Druze society and by its clergy, a shift they suggested was contributing to changing household practices.[40]

Wage gaps also vary significantly by religious and ethnic community. The government's Beijing+30 report gave 2021 average monthly wages for workers and self-employed people aged 25–39: among non-ultra-Orthodox Jews, NIS 14,728 for men and NIS 10,172 for women; among Arabs, NIS 8,517 for men and NIS 7,965 for women; and among ultra-Orthodox people, NIS 9,848 for men and NIS 6,670 for women.[18]

Ethnic divisions within the ultra-Orthodox educational system have also intersected with gender: authorities opened two seminaries for Mizrahi-only ultra-Orthodox girls in Jerusalem in September 2023 after other seminaries persistently denied them admission based on ethnicity, while ACRI and a Haifa University legal clinic called on the Education Ministry to dismantle what they characterized as illegally discriminatory segregated schools.[17]

NGOs cited in the 2023 State Department report described limited healthcare access for Arab and Palestinian women citizens, particularly Bedouin women, as well as women asylum seekers, women without legal status, and Palestinian women residents of East Jerusalem. Emergency health care was generally accessible to most women, and emergency contraception was available as part of clinical care for rape survivors.[17]

Several international bodies have assessed Israel's gender-equality record and identified specific areas of concern. The OECD Social Institutions and Gender Index placed Israel at the bottom of all 38 OECD countries it covered, with a score of 33.4 on a scale where zero represents no gender discrimination. Israel's score for discrimination within the family was 40.9, substantially above both the OECD average of 14.2 and the global average of 37.8.[2]

CEDAW's 2017 concluding observations welcomed Israeli legal and institutional measures but expressed concern about women's low representation in the Knesset, ministerial portfolios, senior academic positions, and diplomatic posts.[29] The Committee raised the exclusion of women under the party regulations of Yehadut Hatorah and Shas, identified labor-market segregation and a persistent gender wage gap, flagged limited labor-market participation among Bedouin, ultra-Orthodox and Arab women, and called for stronger equal-pay enforcement and intensified action against sexual harassment in the military.[29]

The 2023 Gender Index published by the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute recorded a four percent increase in gender inequality compared with 2022.[41] The index found 5 women and 30 men in government positions, 29 women and 91 men in the Knesset, and 15 women and 241 men heading local authorities; men held 62 percent of public-sector management positions, and private-sector chief executives numbered 43,910 men to 9,090 women.[41]

Israeli courts have played a significant role in extending and enforcing gender equality protections. Beyond the 1995 Miller case opening the pilots' course to women, courts have recognized women's right to appointment to religious councils, their right to serve as advocates in rabbinical courts, and prohibitions on gender segregation in cemeteries and public spaces.[5] The Supreme Court has also reaffirmed municipal conditions barring gender separation at public prayer gatherings, even when those conditions were contested by organizers.[17]

The Center for Israel Education assessed the legal system as working "by and large" in favor of female plaintiffs when discrimination cases reached the Supreme Court.[3] The Jewish Women's Archive's account of law in Israel similarly finds that feminist thinking, while not always dominant, found expression in Supreme Court decisions by both men and women justices across several decades.[16]

Pnina Sharvit Baruch and Tammy Caner of INSS argued in their 2023 assessment that weakening judicial review through the proposed judicial overhaul could reduce protection for women's rights, given the courts' historic role in expanding them.[5]