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

In 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.

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

Fida Adely Associate Professor of Anthropology at CCAS

Gendered Paradoxes: Educating Jordanian Women in Nation, Faith, and Progress University of Chicago Press, 2012

Barbara Freyer Stowasser Former CCAS Director and Professor

Women in the Qur’an, Traditions, and Interpretation Oxford University Press, 1997

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

Hisham Sharabi Former Professor at CCAS

Neopatriarchy: A Theory of Distorted Change in Arab Society Oxford University Press, 1992

Frances S. Hasso (MAAS ‘90)

Resistance, Repression, and Gender Politics in Occupied Palestine and Jordan Syracuse University Press, 2005

Consuming Desires: Family Crisis and the State in the Middle East Stanford University Press, 2011

family and personal histories, and perceived marriage opportunities.

Drawing on the experiences of these young women, as well as extensive analysis of broader socio-economic and demographic shifts, Using My Education puts forth three key arguments. First, the trajectories of these women point to the ways in which educational structures can act as both facilitators and obstacles to labor force entry, and shape individual calculations about desirable forms of labor. A rigid tracking system in the Jordanian public-school system acts to predetermine educational and career pathways for young people early in their educational lives. For the young women in my sample, who have been largely successful as students, these structures have created opportunities for women in fields such as engineering and computer science, fields that continue to face significant gender imbalances in the West. In addition to tracking, entry into these fields is facilitated by cultural norms that do not mark the study of math and science as gendered fields more suitable to men, as has been the case in the United States for example. Nearly three quarters of the women interviewed work in engineering, medicine or IT-related fields. While educational structures and cultural norms produce opportunities for women, especially in STEM fields, growing educational inequalities may limit these opportunities in years to come, as disparities in educational quality are most stark along geographic and class lines in Jordan, as they are elsewhere.

Second, the migration of these women of personal narratives of neoliberal forms of points to the broader issue of geographic disprogress, as well as the drive and ambition of parities in economic development in Jordan women who desire, and view themselves as and its gendered manifestations. In the comdeserving of, “something more.” For women munities from which the young women miwho stay in Amman for longer periods, and grate, university-educated men and women face the prospects of remaining single, what have fewer employment opportunities and that something more is becomes less clear thus must commute or migrate to the capiand the benefits of migration less certain. tal for work. The jobs that are available are The women profiled in this book work to public sector ones, which have traditionally fashion their own visions of what a successbeen favored by women and their families. ful trajectory can look like given the conHowever, the women profiled here are worktexts they find themselves in, a context that ing in the private sector, reflecting a broader has been shaped by the powerful forces of trend among single, university-educated education and development, neoliberalism youth in Jordan. Provincial neglect plays out and gender. But in their own lives, they too in complicated ways in the experiences of are powerful—forging new ways of being these women, affecting both how they are a woman in Jordan and reminding us that perceived and treated in Amman, and how there are always many ways of doing gender they themselves come to view their own (Ortner 1996). In this sense, this book and home communities. the narratives of these young women provide

Finally, and most importantly in terms of critical insights into the practice of gender this book’s contributions, the ethnographic in ways that are at times overlooked in more research will highlight the limits of the dompolicy-oriented research on women and lainant analytics used to measure the signifibor in the Arab world.  cance of education and work for women and for the transformation of gender relations. Although economic imperatives provide a Dr. Fida Adely is Associate Professor of Anpartial explanation for the labor migration of thropology, the Clovis and Hala Salaam Makthese women, they do not fully account for soud Chair in Arab Studies, and Director of the motivations or the effects of this trend. the Master of Arts in Arab Studies program at Concerns about a marriage crisis, as well as CCAS. She is author of Gendered Paradoxes: the status that certain forms of education Educating Jordanian Women in Nation, and professions accrue to women and their Faith, and Progress (See page 14). Dr. Adely relatives are all part of the equation. Using is currently finalizing the manuscript discussed My Education also reveals the significance above for publication. جامعة جورجتاون–مركز الدراسات العربية املعاصرة 15