FACULTY FEATURE
Faculty Feature خاص من هيئة التدريس
Gender and Labor in Jordan Professor Fida Adely discusses her research and in-progress manuscript Using My Education: Female Labor Migration in Jordan and Shifting Gender Dynamics. By Fida J. Adely
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n the spring of 2011, I met several women living in student dormitories in Jordan. However, these women were not students; rather, they were single, university-educated women who had migrated from the provinces to the capital city of Amman for work. I met women such as Arwa, who first came from a small town in the south to pursue her master’s degree and was now working for an international NGO and helping to support her elderly parents. Then there was Yasmin, who came to take a position as an engineer-in-training in the hopes that this would lead to regular employment. Her father paid her dormitory fees, as the stipend she received barely covered transportation and food. Tharwa, also an engineer, had been working in Amman for eight years when we met. Despite some initial struggles with her family and her employer, Tharwa was now thriving in her career and was thinking about starting her own business. The stories of female professional migration I heard were many and diverse.
Fida Adely Associate Professor of Anthropology at CCAS Gendered Paradoxes: Educating Jordanian Women in Nation, Faith, and Progress University of Chicago Press, 2012
The numbers of women I encountered and the distances from which they came surprised me. While it was not unheard of for women to move to Amman for work in the early 1990s—when I had previously lived in Amman—it was rare. Furthermore, most internal labor migration in earlier decades consisted of educated women from urban areas going to rural areas to teach in Jordan’s growing educational sector. What had changed to allow these women greater mobility? Why were
Barbara Freyer Stowasser Former CCAS Director and Professor Women in the Qur’an, Traditions, and Interpretation Oxford University Press, 1997
14 Center for Contemporary Arab Studies - Georgetown University
families willing to allow young women to go off to the capital to pursue careers even when their salaries barely covered living expenses, if at all? What hopes and aspirations do these young women bring with them to Amman? What challenges do they face in the city? Where do they hope to go from there? My manuscript Using My Education: Female Labor Migration in Jordan and Shifting Gender Dynamics takes the narrative of women who migrate to Amman for labor as its starting point. It draws on their stories to illuminate how dramatic demographic and socio-economic shifts within Jordan have shaped particular lives, and how a group of young educated women have worked to take advantage of these shifts. Building on 12 years of ethnographic research in Jordan and extensive interviews with tens of women, as well as family members, the book analyzes the effects of developments such as expanded educational opportunities, urbanization, privatization and the restructuring of the labor market on women’s life trajectories, gender roles, the institution of marriage, and kinship relations. Their experiences are an important contribution to a broader literature on rural-urban female labor migration, which has tended to focus on women migrating for work in factories or as domestic laborers. The women who are at the center of Using My Education are university educated, overwhelmingly employed in the private sector, and migrate from “under-developed” regions of Jordan to the capital to pursue professional employment. This increase in female mobility, with the support and sometimes encouragement of families, reflects a significant shift in gendered expectations in Jordan as typically women rarely live apart from their families before marrying. My research shows that the motivation for this migration is not always or entirely economic, but also stems from family and personal aspirations, recent
