Gender and the expansion of university education in Jordan

Abstract

This article explores how gender is threaded through the expansion and privatization of higher education in Jordan. Due to the justified current concern with the educational deficit of Muslim girls, it is easy to overlook the educational advances made by girls in some Islamic countries. In Jordan, girls have profited more than boys from the expansion of higher education. Economic or political reasons cannot explain this change, so explanations for the advancement of girls in the universities have to be sought elsewhere. I argue here that, for Jordan, this female advancement is linked to the commercialization of education set in motion by the early mission schools, the re‐Islamization of society, and the prestige system of ‘culturedness’. For this article, I have drawn upon qualitative anthropological data gathered through interviews with students, staff and parents in Jordan and from an analysis of higher education statistics.

Acknowledgements

Special thanks are due to Mohammed and Shehla Abandeh for their hospitality, to Mrs Kawar for giving me her daughter’s thesis, to the Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology of Yarmouk University, Irbid, for its support, and to Prof Fatima Sadiqi and the participants of the conference Femmes et Education, in Fez, Morocco, 2002, for their comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Notes

1. A ‘public’ university here means a state university, financed and controlled by the state with relatively low student fees. On the other side there are private universities which are financed by religious institutions or investment companies and tend to have high student fees.