employment outside the home, the husband can cease fulfilling his marital obligation to provide for his wife (Biro 1994). This could leave the wife destitute if she has no other means to support herself. Sudanese women may, and in many if not most cases do, receive inheritance from their fathers. That said, a study by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) confirms that, in practice, daughters generally receive half as much as sons (UNDP 2018). Public perception seems to be in favor of gender-differentiated inheritance rights. According to the Arab Barometer (2018), the vast majority of respondents, 87 percent, do not believe that women should have the right to the same share of inheritance as men.<sup>12</sup> However, when it comes to divorce, a considerably larger share of women (54 percent) than men (37 percent) believe that women should have the same right to decide to divorce as men (Arab Barometer 2018).

The 1991 MPSL was significant—and remains significant—not just for the abovementioned reasons but because it transferred authority over family matters from Islamic religious leaders to the country’s political leaders **.** Nada Mustafa Ali, a leading academic authority on Sudan, notes how, in the wake of the passage of the 1991 MPSL, the country’s political leaders took advantage of the opportunity to interpret the 1991 MPSL in a way that allowed them to easily dismiss women from their professional positions. “In accordance with this legal discourse, the early days of the regime saw systematic dismissal of women from public service. This was not government policy, but was concealed during mass purges, or representing it as part of the country’s economic measures in the attorney general’s office, out of 60 employees dismissed almost 60 percent were women, a number of whom had been in senior positions for several years. The justification put forward for that act was that ‘married women were often absent from work’.” (Ali 2016, 12). Ali goes on to say that it was not just women in the formal economy who were targeted but women in the informal economy too, many of whom had been displaced to the capital, Khartoum, because of war or drought.

Based on the KIIs and FGDs that were conducted in Khartoum, Madani (Al-Gezira State), and Nyala (South Darfur State), the way women’s employment opportunities are shaped is aligned with these legal provisions. A woman from Madani who was not working reported that, “My brother’s wife is an engineer. She is graduated from Khartoum University and they offer her many jobs and she succeeded in all interviews, but my brother refuses to [let] her work. He believes that her job is to take care of her home.” According to a human resources manager of a medium-size commercial services operation in Khartoum, “Overall when I hire a female I check if she have kids and if she could work and leave their kids and her house because it’s hard for any female to leave her kids alone, and I ask them specific questions when I make any interview, for example I have two candidates male and female, and the female have kids so I ask her what will you do in some situations, and if she have solution for these cases she could be hired.”

# **_Protections and restrictions in the Labor Code_**

Overall, the 1997 Labor Code includes more restrictions on women’s ability to work than it does protections. That said, the 1997 Labor Code does include a few provisions that serve to protect women.

> 12 While women and younger cohorts seem to be slightly more open to equal inheritance rights, there is not a large difference between men’s and women’s attitudes toward this, with 90 and 85 percent, respectively, disagreeing with equal inheritance rights. Similarly, both younger and older respondents (87 percent of people between 18 and 29 years old and 92 percent of respondents 50 years or older, respectively) were largely in disagreement with equal inheritance rights (Arab Barometer 2018).

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