Decolonizing our questions/decolonizing our answers

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Fida Adely is an Associate Professor at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and the Clovis and Hala Salaam Maksoud Chair in Arab Studies. Dr. Adely is an anthropologist and her research interests include education, labor, development, and gender in the Arab world. selected publications include: Gendered Paradoxes: Educating Jordanian Women in Nation, Faith & Progress (2012); “God Made Beautiful Things” (2012); and, “Educating Women for Development” (2009).

Notes

1. I take the phrase “reverse gender divide” from Natasha Ridge's groundbreaking book, the first to highlight this trend, particularly in the Arab Gulf states.

2. For enrollment numbers, I have consulted the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (http://uis.unesco.org/) and UNDP's Arab Human Development Office Data Mining Tool (http://www.arab-hdr.org/).

3. Females also outperform males in national examinations. In Jordan, females have passed the national secondary completion exam at higher rates than males every year for the last 10 years, in every single specialization (Ministry of Education, Jordan). Similarly, Ridge (2014) shows that females are also outperforming males on many national examinations in the Gulf.

4. While the discourses of youth “demographic bombs” doesn't explicitly make links to the “reverse gender divide” the image of volatile youthful masses is distinctly a male one, and the gender patterns I highlight here can be easily captured by such discourses. See Shirazi (2016) on how such images inform international and local perspectives on male education.

5. The American Association of University Women reports that in 2006, only about 20 percent of undergraduates majoring in engineering, physics and computer science were female (Hill, Corbett, and Rose 2010). More recent statistics show these trends to be about the same if not lower (see National Center for Education Statistics).

6. Recent research has found that these gendered patterns in the United States are classed, with the greatest gaps for females in math in wealthier school districts (Reardon et al. 2018).