Transitions to Adulthood in the Middle East and North Africa

Young Women's Rising?

M. Gebel, S. Heyne

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781349470181, 9781137355553
• eBook ISBN: 9781137355560
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Social Sciences

This book identifies chances and barriers women face in their transition to adulthood in Egypt, Iran, Jordan, and Syria. Adopting a life course perspective, it provides a new integrative micro-macro-theoretical framework and innovative analyses of individual life courses based on longitudinal data.

1

Introduction

Young women’s rising?

In early 2011, tens of thousands of Egyptians took to the streets to protest against nepotism, corruption, despotism, poverty, a lack of freedom, and dismal economic prospects under the Mubarak regime. Many of these protesters were youths, and many were women.¹ Immediately, this raised expectations by Western observers that the uprising in the Arab world would also focus on female empowerment and improving gender rights in these countries. Although women have played a prominent role in the ongoing transformation of this region, the effect of this process on their situation remains unclear. Amidst Islamist party victories in Egypt and Tunisia and increasing reports of sexual assaults on women, Western observers began to doubt that the revolution truly spelled the end of dictatorships or the beginning of greater political freedoms for women in the area.

While it is hard to foresee what these changes will mean for gender equality in the region, it is obvious that women’s socio-economic status has been dramatically changing in the decades prior to the uprising. Young women’s prospects seem to be on the rise according to several dimensions in Middle Eastern and Northern African (MENA) countries.² For example, the World Bank (2013f) noted that the MENA region has undergone tremendous progress according to many key human development indicators. Female life expectancy has increased and women’s health status has improved as maternal mortality and infant mortality rates have decreased. We have also observed a striking drop in fertility rates in this region during the last two decades. The MENA region has made tremendous progress towards increasing women’s educational attainment, experiencing the fastest educational expansion in the world between 1990 and 2010 (Barro and Lee, 2010; UNESCO, 2011a).³ This educational expansion not only induced a sharp decline in female illiteracy rates and increased female educational attainment but also narrowed the gender gaps in educational enrollment at all levels of education (World Bank, 2004).

Despite pronounced educational enrollment among women and declining fertility rates, female labor force participation has nevertheless changed little in the region. Contrary to developments in other world regions, female labor force participation in the MENA region has remained very low, even among younger generations, illustrating women’s generally weak labor market attachment across Muslim countries (Hijab, 2001; Moghadam, 1998; Moghadam, 2003; Spierings et al., 2010). On average, less than one quarter of young women are employed in Muslim countries (ILO, 2011). Moreover, women also experience unemployment (Assad and Roudi-Fahimi, 2007; Gebel, 2012; Kabbani and Kothari, 2005; Matsumoto and Elder, 2010). Unemployment rates among women, particularly young women, are among the highest in the world, in both absolute and relative terms compared to men (Kabbani and Kothari, 2005). Additionally, there has been a strong polarization of the female workforce. While many women end up in precarious informal jobs that do not guarantee job security, social benefits, or worker’s rights, a substantial proportion of young women have managed to attain privileged public sector jobs (Amer, 2012; Gebel, 2012; Gündüz-Hožgör and Smits, 2008). However, it often takes a long time to access these public sector jobs due to their scarcity thanks to economic liberalization and privatization. Accordingly, long waiting lists for young women wanting to enter the public sector have been blamed for the high female youth unemployment (Kabbani, 2009; Kabbani and Al-Habash, 2008).

Besides labor market exclusion and long job searches, women face additional problems on their way to adulthood in terms of both educational achievement and family formation. High dropout rates, low educational quality, and strong educational inequalities are common in many MENA countries and disproportionately affect women (World Bank, 2003, 2004). Previous research has likewise emphasized problems among young people in family formation because of prolonged schooling and job search phases. Consequently, MENA countries have experienced a rise in the average age of family formation due to delayed transitions to first marriage, first independent household formation, and first birth.⁴ This so-called ‘waithood’ (Dhillon and Yousef, 2009a) phenomenon – a neologism combining ‘waiting’ and ‘adulthood’ – describes how youths face increasing difficulties, delays, and uncertainties regarding educational completion, securing an adequate job, as well as the affordability of marriage, independent household formation, and parenthood (Dhillon et al., 2009: 16). Salehi-Isfahani and Dhillon (2008: 6) point to the ‘youth bulge’,⁵ oil income, rigid institutions, and social norms at the root of the problem of waithood among Middle Eastern youths. Singerman (2007) argues that waithood leaves young people stuck between childhood and adulthood without having fully gained financial or social independence from their parents. According to Salehi-Isfahani and Egel (2007), waithood has led to social exclusion among young people, particularly during spells of long-term unemployment. Although this phenomenon strongly influences both young men and women, it is argued to affect young women in particular.

A life course perspective: The transition to adulthood

The previous discussion reveals that, despite progress across several dimensions, young women often remain disadvantaged relative to men. Moreover, progress along these lines is unequally distributed, increasing social inequality as some women profit from these developments while others are left behind. Given the importance of adolescence in determining later life chances (Buchmann and Kriesi, 2011; Hogan and Astone, 1986; Mayer, 2009), understanding young women’s early life courses remains critical. Thus, the more we know about women’s early life courses, the better our overall understanding about their later life chances. Despite this, relatively little is known about the structures and opportunities young women face in MENA countries.

This book aims to fill this research gap by performing a detailed investigation of young women’s early life courses in the MENA region. Traditionally, researchers consider youth a rather static period between the ages of 15 and 24. However, given the variation in life courses in real life, this age period may have different meanings for different individuals (Hogan and Astone, 1986). For example, some women may have already graduated from school, found a first job, married, and had children at this age, whereas others may still be in school, unmarried, and living with their parents. In order to capture this life course heterogeneity we draw on the life course paradigm, utilizing the transition to adulthood concept (see, for example, Buchmann and Kriesi, 2011; Hogan and Astone, 1986). Accordingly, we study the entire transition to adulthood period among young women, allowing this period length to vary by individual. This helps us capture the whole transitional period to adulthood for each individual.

The transition concept of the life course approach emphasizes an individual-level dynamic perspective. As already highlighted in the previous discussion about waithood, many problems that young women face are only apparent when analyzing young women’s life course transitions from a dynamic perspective. Moreover, it is important to adopt a multidimensional perspective in order to assess women’s chances across various life course fields and in order to account for the multifaceted and complex transition to adulthood. However, rather than considering a broad concept including physical and psychological transitions that take place as youths become adults (for a discussion, see, for example, Goossens, 2001), for the sake of parsimony we limit our discussion to social dimensions. In this respect, previous life course research has identified several meaningful transitional stages of adulthood – including school, work, and family – through which young individuals pass (Dhillon et al., 2009; Hogan and Astone, 1986; Shanahan, 2000).⁶

Among the variety of social transitions in the early life course, previous research has emphasized first the process of attaining education. Within the education system, central education transitions are made at different ages. For young girls in the MENA region, the first step in entering the school system represents an important decision. Despite compulsory education laws, some parents deny young women access to the education system. Moreover, there is the risk of dropping out of the education system, even without acquiring a final education certificate.

Second, after leaving the education system,⁷ young women may engage in job search activities and enter the labor market, characteristic of the school-to-work transition process as described in Western literature (for example, Kogan and Müller, 2003). Or, young women can make a ‘school-to-home transition’ by not participating in the labor market at all and entering the family sphere full-time, doing housework and taking care of children or other family members.

Third, family formation, in terms of a transition to first marriage, starting an independent family, and first birth, is a defining element of early life courses in MENA countries (Dhillon et al., 2009; Sieverding and Elbadawy, 2011; Singerman, 2007). While increasingly more young women remain unmarried and childless in Western societies, marriage remains a major event across MENA countries as it allows for legitimate sexual intercourse, pregnancy, and childbearing, likewise representing the normative precondition for independence among young people. In contrast, pre-marital sex, cohabitation, and out-of-wedlock births are immoral and illegal. Furthermore, childbirth represents an especially important event among MENA women, as birthing male descendants enhances mothers’ social status in society.

Thus, we will focus on three primary areas, including education, work, and family, which have been identified as crucial to women’s social integration.⁸ Adopting a dynamic and multidimensional perspective on the transition to adulthood also allows us to detect trade-offs or cumulative advantages across different life domains. Moreover, it is possible to investigate dynamic interrelationships across these spheres by studying how early transition events affect later transitions, and vice versa (Hogan and Astone, 1986). Taking a dynamic life course perspective and addressing the interrelationships between family, education, and work makes it possible to disentangle the complex interactions between these main social domains.

Adopting a holistic perspective on the transition to adulthood is also an innovative contribution to existing Western literature. Previous empirical studies have mainly limited themselves to one or two life course transitions such as educational attainment and labor market entry (Blossfeld et al., 2008; Kogan et al., 2011; Schoon and Silbereisen, 2009; Shavit and Müller, 1998) or labor market entry and family formation (Blossfeld et al., 2005). Consequently, this book not only offers a geographical extension to MENA countries as previous research on the transition to adulthood has largely neglected the interesting case of these areas due to the lack of appropriate data, but it also enhances existing research by combining individual-level dynamic analyses across all three important life stages to adulthood.

Moreover, this book complements existing studies on the MENA region that mainly focus on the transition to adulthood among young men or youths without specifically focusing on young women (Dhillon and Yousef, 2009a). In view of women’s difficulties in MENA countries, this book provides an opportunity to discuss factors which hinder or pave the way to women’s integration and tests them empirically in a region where women’s social exclusion and marginalization is most pronounced. Thus, this book improves our understanding of the disadvantages women face, not only in the MENA region but also more generally through identifying general mechanisms and patterns in women’s pathways to adulthood.

Research design: A life course approach

Our research design builds both theoretically and empirically on the life course paradigm. From a theoretical perspective, we develop a micro-macro theoretical model of young women’s transition to adulthood as a general reference point for studying women’s pathways to adulthood in the education system, the labor market, and into family formation. In order to gain a very detailed understanding of the underlying processes and causal mechanisms, we focus on the three areas of education, work, and family that have been identified as being crucial systems for young women’s life course trajectories. We investigate the well-known triangular relationship in social stratification research between family, education, and labor from a gender perspective in Muslim countries. Thus, we also make a new theoretical contribution by developing a coherent framework for analyzing women’s integration into education, work, and family.

At the micro-level, we postulate an actor-centric individual-level behavioral model. We presume that women and family members are individual agents acting according to their preferences in the face of opportunities and restrictions. This micro perspective is supplemented with a multilevel perspective discussing how the macro context shapes individual life courses (Mayer, 2005). We assume that individual transitions and trajectories are embedded in the societal context of MENA countries (Dhillon et al., 2009; Silver, 2007). Focusing particularly on institutional factors, but also incorporating cultural and structural elements, we describe how the macro-level nation-specific institutional, structural, and cultural conditions define opportunities and constraints and thus shape young women’s life courses. Hence, besides understanding the micro-level causal relationships between these different micro-level factors in the ‘family, education, and labor’ triangle, we also discuss how these micro relationships are mediated by specific macro-level institutional, economic, and cultural factors. This general micro-macro model of young women’s transition to adulthood, which we develop in more detail in Chapter 2, lays down the theoretical predictions tested in later chapters. We likewise complement the general micro-macro model with specific theories from education, labor market, and family research, respectively. We then go on to empirically test each of our hypotheses in each chapter. Using theory-driven empirical analyses, this book aims to further our knowledge about the opportunities and restrictions women face in their transitions to adulthood.

From a methodological point of view, we draw on micro-data from retrospective life history and youth surveys. While most previous studies on MENA women have followed qualitative or purely descriptive analytical approaches (for example, Haghighat-Sordellini, 2010; Sadiqi and Ennaji, 2011), we make use of nationally representative, large-scale individual-level data from household panel surveys and retrospective youth surveys in Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Iran covering the most recent years prior to the Arab Spring. Hence, this book complements existing empirical studies on youths across MENA countries generally (for example, Dhillon and Yousef, 2009a) and specifically on women in these countries (for example, Haghighat-Sordellini, 2010; Sadiqi and Ennaji, 2011). Based on these data, we track individuals over their life courses, enabling us to capture the dynamic processes and micro-level causal mechanisms of the transition to adulthood. Because transition timing and sequences are defined on an individual level, we are able to capture important variations among young women, offering a more detailed understanding at the micro-level.

We conduct the empirical analyses separately for each of the four MENA countries. We specifically selected Egypt, Jordan, Iran, and Syria as they are the only countries in this region that offer the detailed large-scaled, nationally representative micro-data necessary for a detailed quantitative exploration. Investigating young women’s life courses in these four countries using standardized cross-country analyses allows us to detect similarities and differences in young women’s pathways to adulthood across various institutional, economic, and cultural contexts.⁹ We augment these analyses with additional country-specific investigations, depending on the availability of data. In this respect, the data sets we chose complement each other, and piecing the empirical results together creates a full picture of young women’s early life course transitions in MENA countries.

Research questions and aims of the book

Against this backdrop, this book develops three central research aims. Our primary aim is to describe the transition to adulthood among women in MENA countries. Taking an individual life course perspective we describe the incidences, timing, and characteristics of central life course transitional processes among young women, including those in the education system, those in transition from education into the labor market, and those involved in family formation (marriage and childbirth). We plan to show how many women actually experience these various transitional events in their early life courses. For example, how many young girls actually access formal education? What proportion of young girls drop out of school and how do girls succeed in higher levels of education? Regarding labor market entry, what is the share of young women taking the role of a full-time homemaker and how many young women enter the labor market? Specific research questions on the timing of life course transitions are, for example, how long it takes for women to find a job and the length of the waiting time for public sector jobs. Or, regarding family formation, at what age do young women marry and give birth to their first child? Moreover, our goal is to characterize life course transitions. For example, which educational tracks do young women take? What are the characteristics of housework and women’s first jobs, and how do young women subjectively evaluate them? How do marriages take place in MENA countries?

Our second aim is to investigate patterns of social inequality in young women’s life courses in the MENA region. In this respect, Hogan and Astone (1986) emphasized the importance of subgroup differences, which have often been ignored in transition to adulthood studies. Looking at various subgroups of young women, we want to detect variations across individual life courses. Is there a universal transition pattern to adulthood in MENA countries or do the incidence, timing, and characteris...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction
• Part I: Women in MENA Countries: Theory and Background
• Part II: Women’s Success and Failure in the Education System
• Part III: Housework or Wage Work? Young Women’s Transitions After Leaving Education
• Part IV: Family Formation
• Part V: Conclusions and Discussions
• Notes
• References
• Index