Much has changed since Omaima Abou-Bakr was an undergraduate at Cairo University in the mid-1970s. “I was in that generation when it was unthinkable for women to stay unmarried,” she says. “It was the natural thing that by the fourth year of undergraduate studies, you were already engaged.”
Today, after pursuing graduate degrees in the United States, Ms. Abou-Bakr is a professor of English and comparative literature at her Egyptian alma mater. Women make up almost half of the university’s student population, and quite a few of them put off marriage to pursue graduate degrees and careers.
Since at least the early 1990s, Arab governments have made women’s participation in higher education a priority. Across the region, young women fill the crowded lecture halls and bustling courtyards of universities. On many campuses, they outnumber men.
But women’s increased participation in higher education doesn’t necessarily translate into gains within academe and society. Female deans and presidents at Arab universities remain rare; Arab women say they are still questioned and criticized for pursuing careers rather than marriages; and women’s studies, voices, and points of view are largely marginalized, say professors.
Women of Ms. Abou-Bakr’s generation tend to focus on their gender’s advances. “The visibility of women in the public sphere has changed,” she says. “This is a positive effect. Another one is women’s interest in work. It is doable for women to prioritize their careers.”
Younger Egyptian women are more likely to be frustrated by the hurdles they still face.
Eman Morsi, a literature major from Cairo University, laments “the very old-fashioned gender roles” that prevail inside and outside the campus. In her view, many families view higher education primarily as a credential on the marriage market. “People now send girls to college so they’ll marry ‘up’ to a guy with a college degree.” she says. “Going to college is a way to find a more suitable spouse.”
Faculties are often divided along gender lines, she says, and women are expected to pursue “feminine” careers—pharmacy rather than medicine, teaching rather than engineering. The 2005 Arab Human Development Report, produced by the United Nations, notes that across the Arab region, “women are still concentrated in specializations such as literature, the humanities, and the social sciences, where they constitute the majority, which are not in high demand in the job market.”
Women make up only 28 percent of the work force in the Middle East and North Africa (and as low as 14 percent in Saudi Arabia and some of the Persian Gulf emirates), the lowest regional rate in the world.
In Egypt, despite women’s remarkable participation in the revolt that toppled President Hosni Mubarak last February, the country’s new leadership remains overwhelmingly male. Female candidates won only about 1 percent of the seats in the country’s newly elected Parliament, and some of the conservative Islamist parties that have emerged since the revolution support gender segregation and emphasize that women’s primary role should be as homemakers.
New Expectations
The situation is similar elsewhere. In the desert on the outskirts of the Saudi Arabian capital, Riyadh, rises a gigantic new complex that includes enormous domed halls, palm-lined avenues, and acres of housing and offices. This is the recently inaugurated Princess Nora Bint Abdul Rahman University, a women’s university where the sprawling campus, built to accommodate up to 50,000 students, will be served by its own monorail train.
“Being this large, having this budget, having this central place—it sends a message that women’s education is important,” says Fawzia al-Bakr, a professor of education at nearby King Saud University, which, like all universities in the kingdom, has separate campuses for men and women.
Even in conservative Saudi Arabia, women now represent 56.6 percent of university students. Yet “education isn’t necessarily a force for change,” notes Ms. Bakr. “It can be a controlling force, if it reproduces the system.”
In Saudi Arabia, every public space is gender-segregated. Women’s colleges are offshoots of male universities and are subordinate to them, with women always reporting to male superiors.
Her university “is run by men who believe in a traditional relationship between men and women,” says Ms. Bakr. “They take all the decisions.” Every week, she says, she and her female colleagues listen in by telephone while a male dean conducts the staff meeting in the men’s college. It is hard for the women to contribute much on the single phone in their room, she says; sometimes, the line drops.
A freestanding institution like Princess Nora University will have a greater degree of independence. It and other women’s colleges already offer degrees in new fields—including ones in which women cannot yet work, such as journalism and petroleum engineering. It is a way to push indirectly for social reform, says Ms. Bakr.
Her university established a law program for women in 2007. “Now for four years there are law graduates,” she says, “and the families and the fathers themselves are complaining about not finding jobs for their girls.”
Her students are concerned with female unemployment and very interested in obtaining state-sponsored scholarships to study abroad. “Girls express themselves more,” says Ms. Bakr. “They have blogs, they are active in women’s associations. They are looking for a fair share. They question their relationship with men.”
Leaving Men Behind?
That is exactly what social and religious conservatives fear. In many Arab countries, they see women’s entrance into universities and the workplace with concern, blaming it for delayed marriage and a supposed decline in family values. They argue that women’s increasing educational attainments make it difficult for them to find appropriate marriage partners.
In 2008, Ms. Morsi, the former Cairo University student, headed to New York University to pursue a Ph.D. in comparative literature. For months before her departure, she says, she endured warnings from friends, relatives, and complete strangers about the dangers of putting her education ahead of her marriage prospects.
On the day she left the country, a baggage carrier at the Cairo airport overheard her telling the check-in desk she was traveling to the United States to pursue a Ph.D. “He started telling me about all these beautiful, intelligent women he knows who became spinsters,” Ms. Morsi remembers. “He said they got too educated and nobody would propose to them. He said: If you get too educated, you can’t find your equal. Education is good, but don’t forget about marriage and having children.”
Shaikha al-Kuwairi, a 21-year-old student from the small emirate of Qatar, also challenged social expectations to pursue her studies abroad. This year she traveled to Georgetown University to take an intensive English language program before applying to graduate programs in anthropology.
Ms. Kuwairi is the first young woman to travel abroad from her small town in northern Qatar.
“Because I did not have a man to accompany me, I spent a long time persuading my family to let me travel for study,” Ms. Kuwairi wrote in an e-mail to The Chronicle. “My main argument was that education is strong tool which will benefit me and my country. Also I told them that tradition should not prevent me from following my dream.”
In the tiny emirates of the oil-rich Persian Gulf, women outperform men scholastically and are much more likely to attend and to graduate from university. When people speak of an educational “gender gap” here, increasingly they are referring to men’s low enrollment and attainment.
“Here we need to work to empower men,” jokes Fadwa El Guindi, a professor of anthropology at Qatar University, where women account for as much as three-quarters of the student body.
Regardless of whether they have a college degree or not, most men in countries such as Qatar and the United Arab Emirates qualify for well-paid government jobs. There is little motivation for them to pursue demanding degrees. Meanwhile, higher education offers women a rare, socially acceptable chance to engage in activities outside their homes and their parents’ direct supervision, notes Ms. Guindi.
The situation in the Emirates is so particular that academics shouldn’t “carry the theory, the concern, the issues of the West and try to apply them when they don’t exist,” says Ms. Guindi. Gender issues need to be approached “in cultural context.” That context is one in which women need no encouragement to pursue their studies—but society has yet to come to terms with a new generation of highly educated women.
“It is a peculiar situation to be in where educated women end up with the short end of the stick,” wrote Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi, an Emirati businessman and media commentator, in a column in the Abu Dhabi newspaper The National. “Academic ambition ought to be rewarded and not punished. But being labeled spinsters, denied the same rights as their less-educated male counterparts, and expected to marry within a shrinking pool of educated men seems to be their lot.”
Absent From the Top
Despite a widely observed “feminization” of higher education in the region, in Arab universities today “there are many women at the bottom of the hierarchy, and men at the top,” says Lilia Labidi, a professor of psychology and anthropology at the University of Tunis who has served as Tunisia’s minister for women’s affairs in the interim government formed after President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali’s ouster.
Three Arab ministries of higher education—in Oman, the Palestinian Territories, and Jordan—have female ministers. But the percentage of senior female administrators across the region is quite low. According to the Association of Arab Universities, only seven of its 223 member universities are headed by female presidents. (About a quarter of U.S. higher-education institutions have female presidents.)
And women’s stories, perspectives, and concerns are largely absent from the curriculum, say female Arab academics.
“When we teach literature, we teach literature written by men; when we teach politics, we teach politics as practiced by men; when we study language, we use the language of men,” says Nawar Al-Hassan Golley, an associate professor in the department of English and translation studies at the American University of Sharjah, in the United Arab Emirates.
“When I wanted to teach a class on women’s psychology, members of my department opposed this,” says Ms. Labidi.
In the United States, “the large majority of psychology departments, from community colleges to research universities, offer at least one course that focuses on the psychology of women or psychology of gender,” Stephanie Shields, president of the Society for the Psychology of Women, said in an e-mail to The Chronicle. Women’s-psychology classes focus on topics such as the psychology of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood; domestic violence; women’s experience in the workplace; women’s sexuality; and bias in diagnosis and treatment of psychological disorders. But Ms. Labidi’s colleagues argued that there was no reason to focus on women in particular, she says. “It’s cultural, social,” she explains. “There is a great resistance in every field.”
Ms. Bakr, of King Saud University, says a proposal to establish a women’s-studies program there was also stonewalled. “For three years, they transferred the papers from one administration to another, one department to another,” she says. “They lost the papers. We gave up.”
Province of Conservatives
In the meantime, women’s studies in the kingdom are more often than not the province of social conservatives. In December the Center for Female Researchers for Women’s Studies held a conference titled “The Saudi Woman: Her Rights and Responsibilities,” in which the stated aim was to correct “deviant” understandings of women’s issues and to prove “the greatness of our true religion in maintaining women’s rights.” (Islamic law stipulates women’s maintenance, alimony, inheritance, and child-custody rights.) A previous conference focused on the danger posed to Islamic civilization by international women’s conferences and agreements.
Recently a retired professor from King Fahd University, Kamal al-Subhi, circulated a “study” on the effect of allowing women to drive. It consists of anonymous interviews in three unnamed Arab countries about the effect of women’s driving and concludes that if women were allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia, there would be no virgins left in the country in 10 years. Liberal Saudi men and women have mocked the report, but Mr. Subhi has defended it as scientifically valid, and it was reportedly read by the Shura Council, an advisory panel to the king.
It is precisely because of “scholarship” such as this, say Arab feminist academics, that universities should support serious study of women’s status, concerns, and contributions.
There are a number of women’s research centers in the region, such as the Institute for Women’s Studies in the Arab World, at the Lebanese American University, Birzeit University’s Institute of Women’s Studies, in the West Bank, and the American University in Cairo’s Cynthia Nelson Institute for Gender and Women’s Studies.
But many of these centers are partly supported by international donors and are affiliated with private, English-speaking institutions. Women’s and gender studies are almost entirely absent from undergraduate programs and national universities across the Arab world.
Women and Memory
To address this dearth of female voices, Ms. Abou-Bakr of Cairo University and others founded the Women and Memory Forum, a unique venture whose goal is to introduce women’s issues and perspectives into the curriculum, encourage feminist scholarship, and change representations of women.
The consortium of female Egyptian academics translates gender theory and feminist scholarship into Arabic, to create supplemental texts that can be used in fields such as political science, religious studies, history, and literary criticism. Ms. Abou-Bakr and her colleagues are introducing the materials they’ve created “from the back door,” she says, focusing on friends and colleagues who they know will be open to using them. “We have to count on the few people we know from personal relations who are enlightened, progressive,” she says. The forum also conducts workshops for undergraduate and graduate students that introduce gender theory and terminology.
A curriculum that includes women’s voices, concerns, and points of view is more “comprehensive, representative, and fair to the students,” says Ms. Golley, of the American University in Sharjah, who is one of several academics behind the creation of the United Arab Emirates Gender and Women’s Studies Consortium, which will be holding its inaugural conference in March.
Ms. Golley says one of the consortium’s goals is to encourage other higher-education institutions in the region to incorporate women’s and gender studies into their curricula.
“Women are more visible now in all aspects of life, and people in authority are more receptive to the idea of introducing ventures and programs that have the word ‘women’ in them,” says Ms. Golley. “The whole atmosphere—political, social, academic—is right for academics who have experience to push this field forward.”
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