In my talk, I will present an important research that I’ve been leading during the past several years focusing on Representations, Challenges and Opportunities for Women in Computing in the Arab World in academia. Women in Computing is an important and timely topic. Despite the remarkable progress that women made in almost all professions in the US, Canada, Australia, and several countries in Europe, however, their under-representation in the fields of computing raises an on-going societal concern. Very few women are in senior-level positions and the number of women technology-entrepreneurs is scarce. Various international studies have documented the underrepresentation of women at every level of science and technology. This paper is part of a larger project focusing on Arab women in tech fields. In our talk, we will present research that focusing on Representations, Challenges and Opportunities for Women in Computing in the Arab World in academia. Women in Academic Computing is an important and timely topic. Despite the remarkable progress that women have made in almost all professions in the US, Canada, Australia, and several countries in Europe, their under-representation in the fields of computing raises an on-going societal concern and that requires looking at the role that the educational pipeline plays in shaping the profession. The Arab world, however, presents a hopeful exception to these depressing trends. Drawing on three data sources - educational data focusing on enrollments, collected from a range of academic institutions in the Arab world, as well as quantitative survey data and qualitative interviews with Arab women academics in computer science, we shed light on a number of questions. Our preliminary research indicates that women comprise the majority of undergraduate students studying Computer Science in Arab countries including Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, whereas in the United States female enrollment in Computer Science and Engineering has fallen from 37% in the early 80’s to a dismal rate nearing 20% in the first years of the 21th century. By examining these enrollment data in more depth, in conjunction with the additional data sources we have collected, we plan to provide a nuanced picture of the experiences of female academics in computing in the Arab world, with a focus on providing insights into the challenges, and opportunities for Arab Women in Computing and also present motivation factors for enrolling in CS and technology fields.

In-depth open ended interviews, combined with rich data collected from a quantitative survey instrument provide insights into the complex set of challenges and opportunities facing Arab women in tech fields. On the one hand, Arab women’s rates of studying computer science and related tech fields are very high (often around 50%, compared to other regions where the rate is between 15 to 20%). On the other hand Arab women report experiencing various forms of discrimination both from within their own societies and in the context of working in an increasingly global labor market. The data collected for this study provide a nuanced look at the empirical realities facing Arab women in tech fields, as well as informing two important areas of theory: those focusing on discrimination and those focusing on the impact of globalization. Factors to be analyzed will include the role age, location, type of firm and employment status have played in shaping women’s work experiences. Two particularly important areas where the research sheds light on employment experiences include working as employees versus self-employed, as well as differences in terms of how women experience local versus transnational work opportunities. The study also explores women’s motivations for entering the tech industry with a particular emphasis on their desire to contribute positively to local and global communities.

After at least two decades of promoting women’s entry in STEM fields, the United States still struggles to enroll females in undergraduate STEM majors. In engineering and computer science, for example, females still represent less than 20 percent of the undergraduate majors nationally. Many countries in the Arab world do not face the same gender gaps. In Jordan women make up 32 percent of all engineering students and in 2009-2010, females comprised 59 percent of computer engineering majors. These patterns in Jordan reveal that the cultural and gendered biases that associate math, science and computing with males in the United States are not universal ones. Indeed, I have found no evidence of such bias in the Jordanian context. While particular workplaces may be deemed more suitable to females, the notion that math, science, or computing fields are more suitable to males than females is rare. Furthermore, structural factors in the educational sector encourage women to enter STEM fields, particularly women who are academically successful (by all educational measures available to us, females are outperforming males academically across all disciplines in Jordan). While the overall labor force participation rates for women are relatively low, the rates of labor force participation are significantly higher for single university educated women. Drawing on two national micro data sets, as well as multi-year qualitative research on internal labor migration of professional women in Jordan, this paper examines the pathways of women from educational institutions where they are well represented in STEM fields to the workplace. The paper draws on the quantitative data to paint a broader picture of women’s employment in STEM related fields, and in higher-level positions associated with these fields. Building on this context, the paper will then focus on the experiences of women living in the provinces who not only work in these fields but also migrate away from their families to live independently in Amman for work. The experiences of these women, while not broadly representative, are indicative of important shifts underway in the labor market, and the ways in which women are taking advantage of these shifts. Finally, the paper will examine the socio-cultural effects of female professional labor migration, and the ways in which they are indicative of gendered labor transformations that are not visible when we rely on national labor demographics.

In this paper, I compare the experiences of “mompreneurs” to female entrepreneurs who have established technology companies in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). In particular, I investigate the experiences of married expatriate women in the UAE who decide to leave full-time professional employment and establish an entrepreneurial business after becoming mothers. “Mompreneurs” specialize in mother or child related services or products while female entrepreneurs specialize in technology companies. Through a 3-year ethnographic investigation and 60 indepth interviews, I explore how women attempt to re-imagine their mothering in market terms and how they describe the emotions involved in mothering and working. I also explore the variation in managerial practices of “work” in these entrepreneurial ventures: some business owners reproduce organizational cultures similar to their previous jobs but others cultivate cultures of resistance that reinforce the primacy of care as a “work” value for their employees. Finally, I investigate how representations of entrepreneurs feature in both domestic and international cultural and policy landscapes. Based on preliminary analyses, I find that entrepreneurship is a class-based strategy that some expatriate women pursue, enabling them to exercise a form of neoliberal citizenship. This qualitative work complicates our understanding of how state feminism and western-centric narratives of development shape gendered cosmopolitan subjectivities in the Arab world that go beyond the citizen-state dichotomy. The research findings also sheds light on the ways in which the UAE is experienced as “Arab” and as a contested space of permanent temporariness: providing both constraint as well as immense potentiality for emerging subjectivities and career mobility.