Education as an ornament: Iran and Lebanon
Meanwhile, women in Iran and Lebanon are encouraged to pursue higher education, but only as an ornament to add to their social standing. Iranian and Lebanese families typically only “support their daughter's higher education as a way to improve her chances of finding a husband of similar or higher social status, which, in turn, adds to the family's collective social status” (Haghighat 274). Female higher education is otherwise useless in the eyes of many Iranian and Lebanese families, since there is no application for these degrees. No jobs that require such high-level degrees are available to women, and since their training and education is not utilized by society, it becomes worthless in this regard (Haghighat 275).
Because of this paradox, “Iran and Lebanon are two examples of countries where the government has been offering resources, but tapping into and capitalizing on deep-seated notions of traditional family values to keep women out of the labor force and overall political involvements,” though this involvement would stimulate their overall economic development (Haghighat 275).
This is indicative of a wider trend in the region, that though women’s access to some education has increased overall in the past twenty years, it is not usually access to a quality or useful education, since labor force participation has not increased in turn: in 2000, women’s employment in the region was only about 27 percent (Haghighat 288). However, even this employment presents problems from an educational perspective, since “employed workers are often concentrated in particular sectors that contribute to gender segregation in the labor force [and…f]emale concentrated jobs are often lower status and lower paying jobs” (Haghighat 289). Because of this, it is sometimes not even necessary for women to have higher education to pursue these jobs, making it even less likely that they will be encouraged to do so.
From all of these issues, it becomes clear that there are obstacles to women’s access to education in the Middle East. Each of the regional trends discussed indicates just one of the obstacles that females face to their schooling. These can be summarized to three major categories of obstacles: societal roles, resources, and educational structure.
