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Muslim Women – Higher
Education – More Employment – Greater Consumer Power – Changes but Challenges
While much work remains to close the equality
gap for the 800 million Muslim women worldwide, the rates of education and
employment for some have increased dramatically in a short span of time.
March 2015 – By
Saadia Zahidi*
The world’s 1.6 billion Muslims amount to
nearly a quarter of the global population and contribute 16 percent of global
GDP, a rate that is growing at 6 percent annually.
Some 800 million of these people are women—more than the combined
populations of Brazil, Russia, and the United States. And an untold and still
unfolding story exists in their lives, hidden in their classrooms, careers, and
handbags. Changes that took half a century in the United States are being
compressed into a decade in today’s Muslim world, and they are only likely to
accelerate. It’s as if the United States had compressed into a few short years
the half-century evolution from Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique to
Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In. That is the magnitude of this sweeping
change.
In the space of two generations, a widespread education movement has
elevated the prospects of millions of Muslim women, from Tehran to Tunis. Most
governments in the region, especially those that possess oil wealth, have made
massive investments in education over the past decade, rapidly increasing primary-
and secondary-education rates from abysmally low starting points only 40 years
ago. This shift has also occurred for women in higher education: In Algeria,
Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Tunisia,
university-enrollment rates for women now exceed those of men.
These accelerations are not only massive and underreported but ongoing. In
Turkey, for example, both women and men are enrolling in university in much
greater numbers than before, but women’s rate of enrollment is increasing
faster—ten years ago, their levels were 75 percent of men; today they are 85
percent. In Egypt, there were three women for every four men in university a
decade ago. Today, those numbers are nearly equal. And in resource-rich
countries, the situation is even more extreme. In the United Arab Emirates,
women enroll in university at three times the rate of men. In Saudi Arabia, the
university gender gap was closed ten years ago, but the absolute numbers are
also rising: of all women in the university age bracket today, about 50 percent
actually attend, compared with 30 percent a decade ago. That rate is higher
than in China, India, or Mexico.
What does all this mean? As female education becomes deeply rooted and
normalized within family structures, the next wave of change is under way: more
women are going to work. Nearly 40 million Muslim women have joined the labor
force in the past ten years: among them, 9 million in the Arab world, 8 million
in Indonesia, 7 million in Pakistan, 7 million in Bangladesh, 2 million in
Turkey, and 1 million in Malaysia.
All of this underlines the conscious, often deeply personal and brave
decision of millions of ordinary Muslim women and men to break family tradition
and sometimes shun cultural pressures. As a result, a new segment of the labor
market has emerged—and unprecedented consumer power. But the work is far from
complete. Large gaps between women and men’s labor-force participation remain:
for example, about 47 percent of women in the United Arab Emirates that could
be working are employed, compared with about 92 percent of men. If, during the
next 15 years, the participation of women in the workforce across the Middle
East and North Africa simply reaches that of two-thirds of men—around 60
percent—it has the potential to spike regional GDP by 20 percent or more. As
businesses and policy makers recognize the benefits and momentum gathers to
eliminate the barriers blocking Muslim women from full economic participation,
this largely unseen population will truly become a force to be reckoned with.
*Saadia Zahidi is a senior director at the World Economic Forum, where she is head of the
Gender Parity Programme and head of Employment, Skills and Human Capital. In
November 2014, the proposal for her book, Womenomics in the Muslim World,
won the inaugural FT/McKinsey Bracken Bower Prize for business writers under
age 35.