Societal roles & female underemployment
However, the aspect of this problem that has not yet been touched on by this study is the opportunity for female employment in the Middle East. Women’s participation in the labor force in the Middle East remains low due to discriminatory hiring practices. Even though many companies in the Middle East are initially interested in hiring women, “these companies were wary of hiring [them], despite the fact that they prefer female employees, because they assumed that the restrictions placed upon them by their societies would keep them from succeeding at their jobs” (Aslan).
However, unemployment for both genders of young people has been increasing steadily in the Middle East for years. This clarifies another reason that more men have a higher rate of participation in the labor force than women, since families put such an emphasis on employment for their sons. From this perspective, it would be socially inappropriate for a woman to be hired instead of a man in a competitive labor market. This perspective’s prominence in Egypt will be discussed later in this study. Unfortunately, this creates a problem for measuring women’s education and opportunity, since the quality of their education cannot be measured by jobs they obtain after graduation.
Additionally, the useless education provided to unemployable women underlines how circular the problem can be. This is noticed particularly in Iran and Lebanon, where an education is just a placeholder title that provides status to their families. The lack of societal use or opportunity of a degree for a woman who will not be employed is brought about by, and then reinforces, the lack of priority for women’s education in Middle Eastern society. When women do overcome obstacles to obtain their degree, it can become essentially useless professionally due to the dearth of jobs available for the general population, and men traditionally filling those jobs before women. Therefore, women’s education can quickly become unnecessary in the eyes of families or even whole societies and governments due to its current lack of societal profit.
