When everyone else started covering their faces too
For a while, mask mandates made niqab-wearing women less visible rather than more. Research interviewing sixteen women in the US and Europe found a real, if temporary, drop in the prejudice they described experiencing.
An unusual natural experiment, and one this site would not have thought to ask about without the research existing already.
The finding
Interviews with sixteen niqab-wearing women across the United States and Europe, conducted around a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, found that several reported less prejudice directed at them during the early phase of mask mandates, when covering the lower face in public became, briefly, something everyone was doing.
Some described the period as giving them a sense of invisibility they had not experienced before — not standing out in public in a way that normally drew stares, comments, or worse.
Why this belongs on a reference site
Not because it argues anything about doctrine, it does not, and is not offered as if it did. It belongs here because it is a rare piece of evidence about why niqab-wearing women report the reactions they do in ordinary times. If prejudice measurably drops when face-covering becomes universal and secular, that suggests at least part of what these women normally face is a reaction to visible difference — not a specific, stable objection to the garment itself.
That is a modest, testable claim, and testable claims are unusual in this whole area of discussion.
The limit
Sixteen women, self-selected, across two continents, is a small sample, and the effect is described as reported experience rather than a general finding. This page reports what the interviews found. It does not extend the claim further than the research does.
Source. One year on, Muslim women reflect on wearing the niqab in a mask-wearing world — The Conversation.