Israeli women are visible almost everywhere. They serve in the military, dominate classrooms and welfare services, and make up a large share of the workforce. During war and crisis, that visibility only intensifies. Women are described as resilient, capable, and indispensable.
Yet the structural picture tells a different story. Political representation has stalled. Wage gaps remain wide. Domestic violence is rising. The gap between presence and power is not new, but it has sharpened in recent years.
“There has always been an ethos of strong women in Israeli society,” Prof. Michal Frenkel, a sociologist at Hebrew University who studies gender, labor, and religion, recently told The Jerusalem Report. “But equality was more an ethos and a myth than something that actually existed.”
That gap, between the image of strength and the reality of inequality, frames the paradox facing women in Israel today.
Early participation
From the early days of Zionism, women were active in public life. Influenced by European socialist movements, the Labor movement supported women’s participation and suffrage, though often cautiously and through compromise.
Women worked, organized, and participated. There were prominent figures – pioneers, organizers, later a prime minister – but they were exceptions rather than the norm. That early pattern of participation without authority never fully disappeared.
According to the Israel Democracy Institute, Israel ranks 17th globally in women’s labor force participation. Women are widely present in paid work, particularly in education, health, and welfare. At the same time, Israel ranks 86th in wage equality for similar positions, and 85th in women’s representation in senior managerial roles.
Women’s work has long been framed as contribution to the collective – through care, education, and social stability – rather than as a basis for authority or advancement. Frenkel noted that this framing predates the state itself and continues to influence how women’s labor is valued.
“Contribution was never the same as equality,” she said.
Power that stalls
As of 2025, there are 29 women serving as legislators in the Knesset, roughly a quarter of its members. After steady growth between 1999 and 2015, that figure has remained largely unchanged for nearly a decade.
Even when women enter government, they rarely reach the most influential roles. Over the past 16 years, no woman has held any of Israel’s most senior political positions – prime minister, defense minister, finance minister, or foreign minister.
“Women were present,” Frenkel said, “but they were always isolated in leadership.”
Crisis of visibility
The Israel-Hamas War has heightened women’s visibility across public life. Women serve in reserve duty, manage municipal emergency responses, and staff education and welfare systems under prolonged strain.
In the first hours of October 7, Inbal Rabin-Lieberman, the security coordinator of Kibbutz Nir Am, organized the community’s defense and coordinated residents’ response before military forces arrived.
“In this war, women are everywhere,” Frenkel said. “They are holding the systems together.”
At the same time, they remain largely absent from key decision-making bodies. According to the Israel Democracy Institute, women are underrepresented in the security cabinet and were excluded from hostage negotiation teams, despite legal requirements for representation under the Women’s Equal Rights Law.
Backlash and boundaries
The slowing of women’s political advancement has unfolded alongside a wider pushback against feminist ideas. Debates about women were no longer just about representation. They became debates about power, religion, and social order.
“As feminism began to challenge deeper assumptions,” Frenkel said, “the backlash became much stronger.”
That backlash, she added, is not abstract. “Gender becomes the battleground,” she said, “because it touches identity, intimacy, and family life.”
This dynamic is not unique to Israel. In the Israeli case, however, it has intersected with demographic change and political power. As religious and ultra-Orthodox communities have grown in size and influence, long-standing gender arrangements have been destabilized.
Economic pressure pushed many ultra-Orthodox women into the workforce, often into education and, later, hi-tech and professional roles. The response, Frenkel argues, was not retreat but restriction.
“When women start breaking other barriers, the separation becomes more sacred,” she said. “The more women enter spaces that were not meant for them, the stronger the demand for gender separation becomes.”
Behind closed doors
The gap between public strength and private vulnerability is most visible in data about violence. In 2024, at least 12 women were murdered due to domestic violence by midyear, with an estimated 200,000 women experiencing domestic abuse annually.
New data from 2025 points to further escalation. According to the Israel Observatory on Femicide, 34 of the 44 women murdered last year were killed in femicide cases – a 48% increase from 2024.
Despite these figures, funding for prevention programs has been reduced, welfare budgets cut, and civilian firearm access expanded.
Frenkel stated that the increase indicates a broader cycle of crisis and regression. Periods of upheaval, she argued, normalize aggression across society, with violence against women rising alongside it.
“Violence against women is part of a wider violence,” she said. “After war, after trauma, violence in society rises – and violence against women rises with it.”
Not linear
There has been movement. Women’s participation in education and employment has expanded, and women are more visible in public life than in previous generations. However, what that movement has not produced is stability.
“For a long time, we believed that if we worked, worked, worked, things would only get better,” Frenkel said. “That belief doesn’t hold.”
Periods of progress have been followed by retreat – a familiar pattern, in which progress is fragile rather than guaranteed. Still, Frenkel cautioned against prediction. The picture, she said, is confusing, shaped by overlapping social, political, and demographic forces, and offers no clear direction of travel.
“It goes up and down,” she said. “It is not linear.”
The paradox has endured for decades. What changes next will depend not on how strong women are but on how and when the system accepts what that strength has been carrying.■