This is one thing that people love obsessing about. There is an idea that the headscarf "hijab" (and Islam) are instrumental in the oppression of women, and that in countries where the presence of hijab and Islam has increased women have become oppressed.

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This is suspicious. And here is why

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First, it is certainly true that historically Islamic countries have in the last few decades become much more Islamic than they were before that, in 1960s and 1970s. Violent and nonviolent Islamic revolutions have happened in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Tunisia, Turkey, Pakistan, Libya, Iraq....

It is also certainly true that, in connection with this, women in those countries are wearing headscarf hijab (or even better, the veil, burqa) far more than they used to 1960s and 1970s. Miniskirts have disappeared.

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But, does this mean that women in those countries have become more oppressed? Well, by all possible measurement, the answer must be NO!

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In the last few decades, in the same decades that Islamic revolutions happened, women in pretty much all (historically) Islamic countries are vastly more educated to the point that even in Saudi Arabia they outnumber men on all levels of educations. Number of female politicians and CEOs has also increased considerably. Iran and Saudi Arabia have some high ranking female CEOs, even though this is still a rarity even in Western liberal countries. You can see the increase in women's presence in national assemblies in this table:

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SG.GEN.PARL.ZS

Fertility rate has fallen dramatically, with only the poorest African muslim countries having more than 3 children per woman.

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In 1950, Iranian women had about seven children each; today they have about 1.68, fewer than Americans.

n the world’s largest Muslim-majority country, Indonesia, fertility rates dropped between the 1960s and the 1990s, from about 5.6 children per woman to 2.3

The fertility rate across all 49 Muslim-majority countries fell from 4.3 children per woman in 1990-95 to about 2.9 in 2010-15.

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All of these countries have introduced some sort of DV legislation in the recent decades, and they all have various human rights governmental agencies that worry about women in their special ways. This is something that didn't even exist in Western countries before 1960s and 1970s.

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So, by all possible measurements (education, political representation, fertility, legal protection,...), women cannot possibly be more oppressed than they were before the Islamic revolutions. Even if they are oppressed, oppression certainly did not increase since 1970s, since the introduction of Islam and hijab.

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So, there's that.