Paper Authors

Abstract

NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract

Education of Women in Engineering Schools in Jordan: An Empirical Perspective

Abstract Young women in Jordan have begun to demand greater freedom than in the past. Although there are still some traditional practices that govern women’s life style. Women’s participation in different aspects of life has been increasing over the last years; their interaction along with the Jordanian society has begun to take different shapes, the contribution of women to there families, society and in the workforce has been more significant than it was formerly.

In this paper, we will address the factors that limit the enrollment of women in graduate engineering schools; these factors include cultural and economical reasons, labor market outlooks, status and prestige. We study the interrelationship among these factors, the positive impacts on the economy and on some sectors of the engineering industry in general. As we believe that women in engineering related fields have significant role in supporting and enriching these fields. The effective participation of women engineers will help sustaining the society by empowering the women through her participation in all fields, enhancing the Jordanian women's skills, knowledge and access to information.

Introduction

In some developing countries in the Middle East, the role of women in the society was traditionally limited to tasks strongly related to “taking care of their family members” and raising children at home. This narrowed the role of women as productive and efficient contributors of the community and the workforce. It also adversely affected the development process of Jordan’s economy.

As the Jordanian society starts evolving and adopting new values and rules, new practices began to appear. Women start seeking graduate and higher education in different professional fields, and they start to get more and more involved and contribute to the economic and social development of the society. The accumulated successes that women achieve in practical life motivate more of them to participate in the educational process. It also increases the percentage of women as a reliable partner to their coworkers. It is worthy to note that the involvement of Jordanian women in not uniform across all educational disciplines at the higher education level. Some disciplines attract more women than the other disciplines. Some empirical observations indicate that most women move toward studies in the humanities, business, and arts rather than engineering related fields. There are many reasons for that, but mostly, the participation of women in engineering and science related fields are less due to family responsibilities, and social and cultural norms as being the primary barriers. The same observations apply to graduate level education. More details are discussed throughout this paper.

In this paper, we present and address some of the factors that limit the enrollment of women in graduate engineering schools; these factors include cultural and economical reasons, labor market outlooks, status and prestige. We study the interrelationship among these factors, the positive impacts on the economy and on some sectors of the engineering industry in general. We believe that participation of women in engineering related fields has significant impact in

• Citation

• Format
  • APA
  • APA - LaTeX bibitem
  • MLA
  • MLA - LaTeX bibitem
  • Bibtex
  • EndNote - RIS

Gammoh, D., & Mehrabian, A., & Ducharme, A. (2008, June), Education Of Women In Engineering Graduate Schools In Jordan: An Empirical Perspective Paper presented at 2008 Annual Conference & Exposition, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 10.18260/1-2--3342