In the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), the gap between male and female school enrollment and educational achievement continues to widen in favor of girls (Mullis, Martin, Foy, & Arora, 2012). However, nowhere in national or international discourses is this phenomenon mentioned beyond dismissive comments to the effect that the culture or boys and their families are largely to blame (Al Munajjed & Sabbagh, 2011). There is little acknowledgement that current gender disparities are largely the result of structural issues connected to political, economic, and social factors (Stromquist, 2012). International educational target-setting, as found in the Millennium Development Goals, coupled with prevailing Western stereotypes of the oppressed Muslim woman and oppressive Muslim man have contributed to a situation by which the Gulf states are unable to examine issues relating to males without appearing even more misogynistic than they are already perceived (AbuKhalil, 2005). Through a critical examination of modernization theory and discourses around gender and education, this paper utilizes a mixed-methods comparative approach to examine the creation of a reverse gender gap in education in the GCC. Micro-data was collected from students, parents, teachers, faculty, and education policy makers. This was complemented by macro-data from GCC country-level education plans and reports from international organizations. The paper finds that even though countries in the GCC are not aid recipients, they still speak the language that donor organizations and other international development organizations wish to hear regarding gender (Ridge, 2009; Chabbot, 2003). The result has been a myopic, one-sided approach to gender issues with a focus on girls’ education in the face of increasing educational inequalities for boys. The paper also finds that this may have a significant impact in terms of private and social returns to education and broader implications for Gulf society as a whole. The paper is of significance for education across the Middle East as it explores how international discourses can narrow the focus of country level education policies to issues that may or may not be of relevance to them.

In the Middle East and North Africa, the social status of women is associated not only with gender equality, but also with national development policies that are often characterized as ‘progressive’ and ‘modern’ (Hasso, 2009). While development remains multi-faceted, education is widely understood to play a key role in promoting gender equality and economic empowerment. However, since the birth of the Education for All movement, much of the prevailing literature concerning girls’ education in Egypt focused primarily on educational access and not gender equality. In Egypt, early-marriage is implicated as one of the main barriers to educational access for girls living in rural areas. For decades, delaying marriage and reducing fertility rates among women in the global south has been instrumental in increasing educational access for girls and women (Johnson-Hanks, 2006). Policy makers have since developed interventions that increased school enrollment among girls (Assaad, Levison, & Zibani, 2010). Most notably the Girls’ Education Initiative Egypt (GEIE), a partnership between the United Nations and the Egyptian government. The objective of this paper is to analyze the GEIE in the context of one particular educational intervention its efforts produced, the Ishraq (Enlightenment) program. Informed by a critical poststructural conceptual framework and through the use of ethnographic research methods, this case study examines the interplay between transnational development discourse and the ways in which former Ishraq participants engage in the social contests concerning marriage and education. Preliminary analysis of the findings suggests the GEIE and Ishraq reports tend to link program completion and delaying marriage to an increase in ‘empowerment’ for participants. These narrow characterizations are in large part not grounded in the expressed understandings of many former participants and even some Ishraq program officers. Research findings are based on discourse analysis as well as analysis of primary data collected between 2013 and 2014. This data consists of daily observations, informal conversations, and semi-structured and informal interviews with select policy makers, program staff, and randomly selected former Ishraq participants. A focus on educational access alone falls short of addressing the various structural and contextual constraints women and girls in Egypt face on a daily basis. Additionally, particular claims to knowledge and truth regarding the relationship between marriage and girls’ education help sustain certain configurations of power transnationally, nationally, and locally. As a result women’s lives, bodies, and public visibility are important sites where discourses of development, nation, and modernity operate.

There is a multitude of educational programs meant to empower young females across the globe. However, the supposed universality of the concept of empowerment found in many educational programs is problematic, particularly in the context of Morocco where this study takes place. The goal of this study was to explore young women’s perceptions of their empowerment and the opportunity structures in their society; and to understand alternative conceptions of empowerment among a group that would traditionally be thought of as experiencing a lack of empowerment. Women are often portrayed as having a universal experience when it comes to empowerment; however this is not always the case which robs non-Western women of their historical and political agency (Mohanty, 1988). Much of the current research is characterized by Western paradigms of secularism and capitalism, without giving voice to alternative conceptions of empowerment and equality across societies characterized by complex gender relations. Additionally, much of the work on women’s’ empowerment is premised on how gender relationships should be and are prescriptive in nature (Kabeer, 1999). In order to accomplish the goals of this study, the researcher implemented an educational program over four months meant to increase life skills and empowerment with 40 female participants between the ages of 15 and 17 from rural villages in northern Morocco. Participants were selected by educators at their school based on need; all participants were low-income, on government scholarships to attend high school, and came from marginalized rural villages. A participatory approach was used which seeks to reduce the power relations normally involved in research and development (Kesby, 2005). Some argue that participatory development and research approaches are key to empowering marginalized groups while others argue that participation is just one more way that the development industry disempowers local populations. The debate over the utility of participatory development is a central issue in this research as the researcher explored the experience of participatory methods in relation to empowerment. Qualitative data was collected over the course of the program including focus group interviews, community mapping, and researcher fieldnotes. Early results illustrate that youth participation in development work faces many barriers in Morocco, but also that participants find value in this approach. Additionally, the participants’ conceptions of their own empowerment relate closely to the spatial and social constraints of living in a rural village and to the opportunity structures within their villages.

Between the 1899 and 1900 appearance of Qasim Amin’s two works on women’s rights in Egyptian society, almost 30 critiques appeared in print. In his second book, The New Woman, Amin continues his fight against those “religious leaders [who] are quite ignorant of the meaning of their religion … and are unable to consider their country except through an ugly image of outmoded manners and ridiculous traditions.” However, Amin’s one-sided back and forth obscures the exact nature of his detractors arguments. Were his critics, as Amin presents them, merely traditionalist railing against the new ideas of the future? In some cases they were. However, as Leila Ahmed and Juan Cole have shown, these responses also betrayed more complex investments in class interests and concerns with colonial machinations. In this paper, I argue that taken together these works also represent their own re-interpretation of women’s roles in society. Rather than simply regurgitating “traditional” bromides about gender relations in an idealized Islamic society, many of these rebuttals confronted the same social changes Amin was wrestling with: the question of education for women, the role of women in Egyptian public life, and the political contests engendered by colonial domination. Ultimately, these counterarguments were shaped by the same positivist and modernist discourses that Amin himself used. This paper will survey some of the more prominent responses to Amin, like Talat Harb’s Tarbiyat al-Marʾah wa-l-Ḥijāb (1899) and Muhammad Wajdī’s al-Marʾah al-Muslimah (1901) as well as several of the lesser known reactions from these early years: works like Jalis al-Anis (1899) by Muḥammad al-Būlāqī, Fasl al-Khitab (1901) by Mukhtār al-ʿAẓmī, and others that took Amin’s challenges seriously and sought to answer them in the context of a changing Egyptian society. Indeed, by engaging Amin, in public, through the press, and by way of debate, they too were reflecting and impacting the course of the early women’s movement. In many cases and in ways that are often undetected by researchers focused on the literature produced by the “new elites” of the Egyptian effendi class, these works provide an explanation for the less-than-enthusiastic reception women’s rights found in other parts of the Egyptian public. Understanding how these writers sought to “answer Amin” brings to the fore the other half of the debate that Amin was most certainly engaged in, but which has been ignored by our historical recollection of early feminist thought of the Middle East.

Abstract: Art has a special power to confront social injustice and incite change. This paper aims to focus on the modern art production in Iran of the 1960s and 1970s searching for artworks that denounced women inequality issues. The artworks of several prominent women artists of the pre-revolution era will be probed and the lack of activism apparent in their works will be discussed. According to statistics before the 1979 Revolution almost 13% of women were in labor force. At this time, women were already able to vote, the practice of polygamy was outlawed, abortion was conditionally legalized, passport restrictions and divorce laws had improved; all to fit a more modern society. The state promoted participation of women in public space and encouraged a permissive society protecting many equal rights for women. This paper will demonstrate, as empowering as the state granted rights were for most women, themes and topics of women’s artworks reveal a timid attitude and a clear neglect to speak up against furthering women causes. A review of documented exhibitions and print media will indicate that no major art shows touched upon or promoted awareness of the various types of violence toward women, no crucial topic became the theme of any major exhibition to create empathy for women stories or give commentary on their un-equal institutionalized position; and most importantly there were no indications of any visual dialogues covering existing pervasiveness of unfair norms and customs or crimes in the name of “honor” in these modern exhibits. The artworks of several Western-educated women artists who returned to work in Iran, along with other trendsetter women artists of the time will be examined. These women artists regularly exhibited and were included in major national and international exhibits side by side with men. However, as much as their modern works were unique and commendable, the artworks demonstrate no awareness of the ongoing feminist art movement, no reflections on a long series of social injustices that could have been improved, no refusal to accept unequal social arrangements and no documented attempts to question the realities of a male-dominated culture. A multidisciplinary approach is incorporated in evaluating artworks in order to cover many aspects of art criticism.

Unemployment rates among women in the MENA region is alarmingly high- in some cases close to a quarter of the female labor force are looking for jobs. This is in view of the fact that female labor force participation in the region is the lowest and in some countries it has declined in the past few years due to the political unrest. Ironically, women’s education has been on the rise for some time. It seems education has not translated into an increase in employment. Perhaps unsurprisingly because it appears that attempts by policy makers at national and international levels to address the unemployment problem have focused on the paths Morocco and Jordon have taken. In both cases labor-intensive manufacturing for export- typically low pay and often coupled with precarious working terms- has been adopted successfully and in both countries employment for women has increased. Yet, one can hardly view these types of employment options as ideal. This paper focuses on how women’s high education can be channeled into small and medium enterprises using their high skill level, especially in the digital world. The paper will draw upon a white paper written for the ADB on the topic of Women’s Economic Empowerment through SMEs in North Africa and reflects on some of the successful examples, such as a recent increase in educated women’s entrepreneurship in virtual spaces and in high tech enterprises. New estimates suggest that well over a third of tech entrepreneurs in the MENA may be women, much higher than the estimated 10% for the rest of the world. It is a very new trend that has come to be called “start-up spring.” New information technologies (IT) offer significant opportunities for the region’s educated women to participate in the economy as SMEs. Indeed such employment may be viewed as a more favorable option than labor-intensive manufacturing for various reasons other than wages. IT allows work to be done via home-based activities and in asynchronous ways, thus facilitating economic activity through flexibility of time and location of work. This possibility could reduce the tensions between labor force participation and social constraints such as gender segregation that are prevalent in the region.