Visible Muslim Identities and Global Work: Jordanian Women and the Recognition of Mobile Professionals

ABSTRACT Research on women's global mobility has identified persistent family, organizational, and destination‐related constraints, and scholarship on Muslim women has established the consequences of visible religious identity at work. How these conditions become connected as women move between contexts is far less clear. Drawing on 26 interviews conducted in Arabic with Jordanian women in assigned and self‐initiated international mobility across Gulf, European, North American, and other destinations, eight of them across more than one region, we examine how gendered religious identity is recognized differently across family, organizational, and destination settings. Mobility depended not on willingness but on gendered processes through which ambition acquired legitimacy, availability was inferred, religious identity became socially legible, and anticipated risk was translated into protection. Legitimacy proved regime‐specific: what a woman established among her family authorized her departure and conferred nothing on her arrival, while judgments formed in one setting crossed into decisions taken elsewhere. We develop the Nested Visibilities Framework to conceptualize international mobility as movement between regimes of recognition, and show that religious legibility is jointly shaped by destination meanings and organizational interpretive norms whose boundaries need not coincide.