In the 1980s, after a decades-long emphasis on economic growth as the primary engine for development, a number of prominent economists and development practitioners heralded a new era in the conceptualization of development as primarily a human endeavor with improved life chances and quality of life as the proper end. Thus was coined the term “human development,” followed by subsequent efforts to delineate the essential dimensions of human development and the appropriate measures of a development endeavor that no longer had “growth” (and, more narrowly, increased income) as its primary indicator but now sought to measure human ends, capabilities, and opportunities. Of most prominence, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) took up this charge in the form of an annual global human development report, releasing the first one in 1990.Footnote ³ Perhaps no other human development reports have received as much attention in the past few years as have the Arab human development reports.

This article provides critique and analysis of the Arab Human Development Report 2005: Towards the Rise of Arab Women (AHDR 2005). That the AHDR 2005 should be devoted to the issue of women comes as no surprise given the centrality of women and gender as a category in development discourse today and the international scrutiny that has been directed toward Arab and Muslim women by the West. In some respects, the report is unique in its treatment of women and development for reasons I will discuss. However, in most respects the report reproduces a dominant frame of analysis and a liberal-modernist discourse in its treatment of women in the Arab world, pointing to contradictions embedded in the human development framework and the underlying limits of this purported discursive shift.

The expansion of people's “choices” is critical to the development framework of the UNDP human development reports. I argue that there is a tension, evidenced in the AHDR 2005, between the claim that providing education is an essential element of expanding choices and the assumptions embedded in discussions about women and education regarding which choices are acceptable and/or desirable. These tensions point to the persistence of values derived from the mandates of global capital, albeit in the new language of neoliberal choice, revealing that human development in reality does not present a significant departure from earlier conceptualizations of development.Footnote ⁴ I draw on my ethnographic research to interrogate such assumptions and to shed light on the ambiguities built into the educational project, at least for some young women in Jordan today.

CAPABILITIES AND HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

At its core, the human development discourse emphasizes expanding people's choices through the development of human capabilities. For Amartya Sen, capabilities are essentially the ability of people to live the way they want to live. Thus, the freedom to develop is not narrowly about the legislation of rights or the provision of resources but is rather about the freedom and ability to make choices among a multitude of desirable and achievable alternatives. According to Sen, “Capability is thus a kind of freedom: the substantive freedom to achieve alternative functioning combinations (or less formally put the freedom to achieve various lifestyles).”Footnote ⁵ Furthermore, he argues that the “persistently deprived” or historically oppressed and excluded have over time come to limit their own field of choices or conceptualization of what is feasible.Footnote ⁶ Thus, he argues, human development is meant to expand the field of available choices—not just materially but mentally:

This qualification is particularly relevant in considering the ways in which the capabilities approach has been employed as a conceptual framework for understanding women's persistent inequality. The theoretical work on this conjecture is most closely aligned with the research and writing of Martha Nussbaum, whose book Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach lays out her arguments about the necessity of a human capabilities perspective to overcome the persistent deprivation of women around the globe.Footnote ⁸ Nussbaum, like Sen, emphasizes the important distinction between a utilitarian framework for understanding development and people's preferences and a capabilities framework that seeks to provide the capabilities necessary for the traditionally excluded to envision alternate choices. In addition, Nussbaum argues that to be effective a set of universal and central capabilities must be delineated:

Thus Nussbaum endeavors to provide a list of fundamental human capabilities that represent the “bare minimum of what respect for human dignity requires.”Footnote ¹⁰ However, as Nussbaum makes explicit, these necessary capabilities can be independent of individual preferences.

Such a conceptualization of development, with human capabilities and choice as its central elements, provides an important backdrop for a critical reading of the AHDR 2005 and other documents that take the capabilities approach as their starting point. Despite the core assertion about the expansion of choices through the provision of capabilities, the conceptualization of choice is ambiguous and misleading, most significantly because the emphasis on individual capabilities and “choices” glosses over the larger structural barriers and power dynamics that constrain actual opportunities.Footnote ¹¹

The problematic nature of this conceptualization of development as the expansion of choices appears most clearly in discussions about women's education in the Arab world. Underlying the belief in the power of educating women is an assumption about the proper forms that development should take and the assumed preferences women will have if only given the proper capabilities. These preferences are consistently linked to male-dominated fields of study and waged labor. Arab-women's choices have not always fit the patterns and correlations that development researchers have come to assume and assert in their educational policies and programs. In the AHDR 2005 as well as in the broader literature on this topic, one typically finds “Arab women's”Footnote ¹² choices cast as a problem of culture, religion, and family.

EDUCATION FOR WHAT? THE ASSUMED BENEFITS OF EDUCATION

In a human capabilities perspective, education, particularly formal schooling, is a key capability; denial of education is a major deprivation. A plethora of research points to the particular benefits that come from educating women. At the most basic level, studies have demonstrated a correlation between increased levels of education and decreased child mortality, decreased fertility, and increased life expectancy.Footnote ¹³ Even when statisticians control for factors such as income and geography, the relationship between increases in girls' education and improved health outcomes persists although the relationship to lowered fertility rates is less consistent.Footnote ¹⁴ Furthermore, the increase in the number of years of education for women has been shown to lead to increased earned-income potential.Footnote ¹⁵

It has been more difficult to establish how education leads to such outcomes. What are the actual characteristics of schooling or education that contribute to such benefits? Answers typically fall into three categories. First, some research relates these outcomes to the characteristics of the girls. For example, girls who go to school tend to be healthier, less likely to suffer from malnutrition, and thus more likely to have healthy pregnancies and give birth to healthier babies.Footnote ¹⁶ Second, some researchers link improved outcomes to the curriculum, which presumably provides information that helps young women make more informed health decisions.Footnote ¹⁷ Related to this second category are arguments about the ability of educated women to “process” new information, the assumption being that formal schooling makes them more adept at handling such information.Footnote ¹⁸ Third, some studies argue that education increases the confidence of young women and/or empowers them to control decisions related to their fertility and health and that of their children.Footnote ¹⁹ In other words, girls who attend school will develop more confidence and, as a result, be more likely to assert themselves with male partners or to seek out medical care and be more assertive in their interactions with health-care providers. Beyond health benefits, it is typically assumed that educated women are more likely to pursue waged labor and that waged labor in and of itself is empowering for women, primarily because of the financial independence it is believed to grant. Such research forms the dominant frame within which the relationship between female educational attainment and development is understood, although this framing also faces criticism.

In many respects the Arab world has proved an anomaly. Women in the Arab world do not always follow the predictable patterns that have come to be viewed as a natural outcome of educating women. In 2004, the World Bank published its own report about women in the region, Gender and Development in the Middle East and North Africa: Women in the Public Sphere. From the bank's perspective, the major “gender paradox”Footnote ²⁰ in the region is found in the high rates of educational attainment alongside low rates of economic participation:

The paradox is even more profound for particular Arab countries. Jordan, for example, where females have full access to primary education and high rates of access to secondary and tertiary education, does not fit the dominant model in two respects. Despite high levels of schooling for girls, Jordan continues to maintain a comparatively high fertility rate as well as significantly low rates of labor-force participation.Footnote ²²

Understanding the terms through which the larger field of gender, education, and development is framed—and how the trends in the Arab world, which contravene this framework, are subsequently interpreted—is critical for understanding how the AHDR 2005 represents educational attainment and represents women's development as a function of this attainment. Despite efforts to put forth a unique representation of development issues and challenges in the Arab world, the report constructs the same middle-class, liberal ideal of modern women who, given the proper education, can shape their fertility options, economic standing, and opportunities for political participation.

THE “RISE OF ARAB WOMEN” AND EDUCATION: PERSISTENT EXCLUSION?

The Arab human development reports are in many respects groundbreaking. Unlike many reports in this genre, they stand out both in terms of the scope of the issues they address and the lengths to which the authors have gone to provide some context for what are often depicted as universal development problems. For example, the authors of the AHDR 2005 refer to the invasion and occupation of Iraq and the U.S.-led war on terror and assess their significance for thinking about women's human development. This approach to a regional development report is so out of the ordinary and controversial, in fact, that the head of the UNDP, in his foreword, takes pains to distance himself from the report.Footnote ²³ Furthermore, the authors draw upon papers commissioned from authors throughout the region, intellectuals and activists involved in a complex process of collaboration.

Although in these respects the report's approach is unique, the underlying assumptions regarding what constitutes development or improved quality of life are not significantly different. The report's assessment of the status of women in the region and proper outcomes of successful development are largely shaped by a liberal, modernist discourse that undergirds mainstream conceptualizations of development. Asef Bayat, in his analysis of the first three AHDRs, points to this fundamental contradiction:

In the AHDR 2005, this reversion to “conventional” development categories and assumptions is particularly clear in the section on education and the subsequent discussion about women's economic participation. Here it is assumed that given the right capabilities—the right education—women will make predictable and universally desirable choices about fields of study, work, and family.Footnote ²⁵ These “choices” are shaped by assumptions about the desirability of waged labor for economic development and as a necessary foundation for female empowerment. The failure of women to thrive in this respect is explained largely in cultural terms, and little attention is given to differing desires and constraints faced by women differently situated within the broad spans of the Arab world. Thus, although the report provides some historical and political contexts for discussing women's developments, this reversion to homogenized stereotypes of “Arab culture,” “Arab families,” and “Arab women and men” limits the ability of the report to transcend the universalizing tendencies of such reports.

Assumptions about the appropriate “choices” a developed and educated citizen should make enable the authors of the AHDR 2005 to paint women's educational gains in the Arab world in a negative light despite much evidence to the contrary. Mass public schooling is relatively new to the Arab world. Like many parts of the developing world, the mass expansion of public schooling began in earnest only in the 1950s or 1960s and in some states even later.Footnote ²⁶ In a relatively short period of time, however, most Arab states have been successful in providing access to formal education for boys and girls. Despite acknowledgement in the AHDR 2005 that the Arab world has made tremendous gains in providing access to formal education for girls, the overall picture presented is bleak. The report is punctuated by statements about the “denial” and “deprivation” of girls and women from this capability that is so critical for their development. Any positive reflections on the status of “knowledge acquisition” among females are framed by a much more critical perspective (usually in the introduction to discussion and again in the conclusion). The following statement is typical:

A careful look at the data presented in the report reveals a much more nuanced picture and points to several problems with the way in which female education and the data on education are framed. Some of the gaps in the discussion of education are related to the ambiguity of certain statements, such as that the Arab region “displays one of the lowest rates of enrollment at various levels of education.”Footnote ²⁸ One is left wondering, lowest compared to what, enrollment in what institutions, and what constitutes education in this context.Footnote ²⁹ Such ambiguity is not unusual for this genre of reports but can be decidedly misleading.Footnote ³⁰ Furthermore, throughout the report, the depiction of the status of female education is enabled in large part by regional averages that mask substantial regional and class differences. Finally, in the AHDR 2005, the most serious critiques related to education are reserved not for the obstacles in knowledge acquisition (because the large majority of females in the region are in school) but for the types of knowledge young women acquire and, of most importance, for the uses to which such knowledge are put. The last sentence of the passage cited previously is indicative of this sentiment: the report's authors lament that girls and women are deprived of “forms of knowledge that bring high social returns.” I will revisit the question of what these returns are envisaged to be. First, however, a closer look at the data and the status of girls' and women's access to schooling is relevant.

The AHDR 2005 paints a depressing picture of female education in the Arab world. According to the report, “The relatively higher deprivation of girls in terms of educational opportunities at all levels extends across all [my emphasis] Arab countries . . . .” This statement is clearly belied by the data: at all levels of formal education in many, and at times a majority of, Arab countries (depending on what level of education is under consideration) girls are enrolled in equal or greater numbers than boys.Footnote ³¹ How then can the situation be depicted as such? One key explanation is the use of regional averages that gloss over major differences within the region. Two to four countries consistently bring down the averages. Although acknowledged in the report, this reality is overshadowed by sweeping statements about girls' educational deprivation.

The AHDR 2005 presents data on primary-school enrollment for nineteen countries. Of these, nine have an equal number of boys and girls enrolled and in some instance more girls than boys.Footnote ³² In another six countries, the gap between boys and girls in primary enrollment is less than ten percent. The countries with the lowest rates of primary-school enrollment are significantly lower than the other Arab states. The enrollment rate in Comoros, Sudan, and Djibouti is less than fifty percent for girls. However, in these countries the enrollment rates are alarmingly low for boys as well.

Some understanding of context in these “outlier” countries is critical for understanding regional disparities. Djibouti, for example, is one of the poorest countries in the region; according to the UNDP, it ranked at the bottom of all Arab countries in 2002 for human development.Footnote ³³ Djibouti faced considerable political unrest and a period of civil war in the 1990s.Footnote ³⁴ According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 39 percent of girls and 49 percent of boys were enrolled (gross enrollment) in primary school in 2006.Footnote ³⁵ This gender gap hardly seems the central issue given such low numbers. Within Djibouti one also finds major internal differences, with a nomadic population that has more limited access to formal education. For example, the gross primary-school enrollment for children of nomads is estimated to be as low as 11 percent.Footnote ³⁶ In a similar vein, in both Comoros and Sudan, poverty, war, and instability underlie obstacles to educational access for females as well as males.

The discussion in the report of girls' secondary-school enrollment begins by highlighting that “fewer than eighty percent of girls attend secondary school in all Arab countries except for four: Bahrain, Jordan, Palestine and Qatar.”Footnote ³⁷ The decision to frame secondary-school enrollments for girls in this manner is highly problematic when one examines the full picture. In nine of the sixteen countries for which data are given, there are more girls than boys enrolled in secondary school. In an additional three countries, the gap between boys and girls is less than 10 percent. Thus, the educational-access issue at the secondary level is not strictly, or even most of the time, about girls being denied an education that is available to boys. Boys are just as likely to be out of secondary school in a majority of the countries profiled.

The most significant gaps between male and female enrollment are found in Yemen, Djibouti, and Mauritania. Once again, boys' enrollment rates are also troublingly low, although the gap between girls and boys in Yemen is very large, with less than half as many girls in secondary school as boys.Footnote ³⁸ Much of this gap can be explained by rural/urban disparities and poverty; Yemen is one of the poorest countries in the world. This is in turn compounded by the lack of female teachers in rural areas and the persistence of early marriage. However, the situation in Yemen is quite distinct from that of other countries in the region.

One point that is never made but can be extrapolated from the data is that the countries with the most serious educational exclusions for girls face similar challenges in enrolling boys in school. This silence is perhaps no surprise given the report's focus on women. However, the failure to contextualize girls' low secondary-school enrollments in Mauritania, for example— where girls' secondary-school enrollment increased by 3 percent between 1999 and 2005 and boys' enrollment decreased by 1 percentFootnote ³⁹ —gives a misleading picture of the major educational development challenges in this country. Recent research on girls' educational access points to the importance of other factors beyond gender that help explain the persistent exclusion of some girls from school. These include their status as members of marginalized subgroups in their societies, whether they live in urban or rural areas, and the socioeconomic status of their families.Footnote ⁴⁰ In some contexts (e.g., Egypt), urban or rural differentials in school enrollment are much more significant than male or female ones.Footnote ⁴¹ Nonetheless, in development literature, challenges to educational access are still typically framed in terms of gender.

Yet, the trouble with the way in which female education is represented goes beyond the presentation of enrollment data. The discussion of higher education in the report is particularly revealing of underlying assumptions about the benefits and proper deployment of education capabilities. Of the seventeen countries profiled in this section, girls outnumber boys in eleven countries.Footnote ⁴² Given the strength of these numbers, the authors say little about the lack of access to higher education. By their own account, gender parity has been achieved in twelve countries. However, the overarching message is still a negative one—young women's inability to thrive. According to the report, the problem with higher education for females lies in the fields that women choose to pursue, or, to be more precise, that social and cultural constraints pressure them to pursue. As such, the analysis of higher-education data focuses on how women are disempowered by choosing to pursue study in the humanities and social sciences. Although the authors acknowledge that more women are entering the sciences, this shift is still viewed as insufficient because young women are not choosing the “right” sciences. For example, the report states that young women tend to prefer chemical engineering over electrical engineering or pediatrics over surgery.Footnote ⁴³

When such conclusions are placed into a more global frame of reference, one finds female science enrollment in a number of Arab countries to be significantly better than in the United States. For example, the report provides data on enrollment in engineering programs in nine Arab countries. In six of these nine countries (Bahrain, Djibouti, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, and Palestine) over 20 percent of engineering students are female.Footnote ⁴⁴ By way of comparison, in 2000, female enrollment in engineering was at a high of 20 percent in the United States. In 2005, only seventeen percent of undergraduates enrolled in engineering in the United States were female.Footnote ⁴⁵ Furthermore, in the United States many more women graduate with degrees in chemical engineering than electrical engineering (in 2005, 35% compared to 14%)Footnote ⁴⁶; according to the AHDR 2005, this is evidence of persistent gender bias. If one accepts a standard of educational progress for women that accords greater value to male-dominated fields, many women in the Arab world are actually doing better than women in the United States.Footnote ⁴⁷

A number of concerns are raised through a critical look at the section on higher education. First is the contradiction posed by asserting that the acquisition of knowledge expands women's choices alongside the explicit statements that women should enter certain fields and that they should use their education for work outside the home, preferably in male-dominated fields. It is interesting, however, that the authors assert that it is local culture, the family, and men who undervalue women's contributions to society.Footnote ⁴⁸ Yet it seems clear that the economic mandates of development and Western-dominated financial institutions are culpable for devaluing noneconomic contributions and economic contributions that do not fit into preferred categories of wage-earning labor.Footnote ⁴⁹

Women's labor and economic contributions are discounted in development discourse on two fronts. First, no value is credited to the important labor undertaken in the home for maintaining a household, raising children, and, especially among lower-income households, struggling to ensure economic survival through careful household management and manual labor.Footnote ⁵⁰ Second, women's participation in informal income-generating activities, in family businesses, and in the agricultural sector is rarely captured in development statistics and in many instances explicitly devalued.Footnote ⁵¹ The AHDR 2005 reinforces this tendency by explicitly devaluing women's decisions to enter “traditional” fields, with the only explicit characteristic given for a desirable field of study being the dominance of men in the field, or fields determined to be those with “higher returns.”

The authors attribute female choice of educational fields to social pressures and to females' own beliefs, which are shaped by a patriarchal society, about what is possible and even desirable. They point to female preferences for jobs “that do not contravene the traditional view of their reproductive role or the division of work in the house and the raising of a family.”Footnote ⁵² The report emphasizes that social beliefs about the proper place of women limit female educational and career aspirations. They do cite one example of an explicit university policy in Kuwait that has higher entry requirements for females,Footnote ⁵³ but beyond this example the barriers they note are cultural, social, and most immediately familial. The concluding message in the education section of the AHDR 2005 is that girls are struggling and achieving, and in many cases outperforming boys, in spite of their “culture” and families: “It is important to emphasise that girls achieve their academic successes in spite of obstructive social and family environments, which envelop many of them in the fallacy that a woman's destiny is the home while learning and careers are basically the domain of men.”Footnote ⁵⁴

What is perhaps most troubling about explaining female choices in this manner is the failure to acknowledge that females might be acting on their own preferences—preferences that are often shaped by the desire to have a career that will enable them to spend more time with their future families and children. Readers are led to believe that women either have no real choice because they are being forced to pursue paths that are determined by rigid gender barriers or that they are suffering from a form of false consciousness that prevents them from even imagining alternative pathways. This analysis oversimplifies the decision-making process and fails to account for the full range of factors that work to shape and influence decisions about field of study and future career and family trajectories. It also assumes that such decisions could be made by individuals independent of their families' counsel, financial situation, and previous experiences of family members, such as older siblings. Families and “male culture” are essentialized as the traditional realms of backwardness and patriarchal oppression that need to be combated through modern education.Footnote ⁵⁵ Women are seen as separate from these entities—as individuals who, if only given the capabilities, will make choices different from those their families' desire for them. Footnote ⁵⁶

It is obvious that patriarchal notions of a proper division of labor do exist and are at play in framing people's choices and desires—both men and women—but that does not preclude other explanations or an attempt at a more complex analysis of factors in such important economic, political, and personal decisions. The analysis in the report and in similar reports assumes that if women are given “real” freedom to choose, they will prefer waged labor outside the home. Were they free to develop their intellect and desires, they would realize that their labor outside the home would liberate them and empower them in the face of oppressive families and social structures. In this perspective, working outside the home is always a sign of progress, never an indication of need or deprivation.Footnote ⁵⁷ Such an analysis also excludes the possibility that a desire to balance work and home is legitimate, despite the fact that related challenges are regularly the subject of public debate and discussion among middle- and upper-class women in the United States.

One recent example is instructive for comparative purposes. In a New York Times opinion piece on 25 April 2007, Linda Hirshman warns that the recent trend of fewer women with young children entering the labor force in the United States is problematic both for the economic potential and productivity of the U.S. economy because of the lost wages for women who choose to reenter the labor force later.Footnote ⁵⁸ Most interesting about this piece was the response that it elicited. Two days after its publication, nine letters were published in The New York Times, all of which criticized Hirshman's devaluing of some women's decisions to stay home with their children.Footnote ⁵⁹ The letter writers (all women) questioned her assertion that “participation in public life allows women to use their talents and to powerfully affect society” but staying at home to raise children does not.Footnote ⁶⁰ One writer argued that feminism should have taught “us” that “choice is key.”Footnote ⁶¹ Yet this is not the kind of choice that development discourse affords Arab women, nor is it a debate that is given legitimacy in the “developing world” context. Rather, as it reads in the AHDR 2005, such a choice or debate is the product of oppression or false consciousness.

My own interactions with women in Jordan in the course of conducting ethnographic research there revealed some of the ambiguities and conflicting pressures surrounding work outside the home. I conducted this research in 2001, 2002, and again in 2005 for a total of fifteen months.Footnote ⁶² Consider the experience of Nur,Footnote ⁶³ a woman who had retired from a low-level civil-service position as a typist when I met her. In several conversations about the desirability of work outside the home and her own experiences as a working woman, she expressed conflicting sentiments. She was the mother of seven children and entered the workforce only when her oldest child entered university. Her spouse was a schoolteacher, and they could no longer make ends meet with the university-related expenses. So, in her perspective, she was forced to work.

In many respects, Nur felt frustrated and disempowered by these circumstances. She was no longer able to care for her children as she wanted. Until she came home, they were out in the streets playing. Furthermore, exhausted from the long hours of sitting at a typewriter, she found it challenging to be the great hostess she had prided herself on being when family and friends came to call. She also missed the time she used to have with the women in the neighborhood. At times she resented having to work; on other occasions, however, she conveyed that being able to make decisions about purchasing items without having to go to her husband gave her some independence.

Although Nur found that work isolated her from her social networks, many of the teachers with whom I spoke found that working outside the home gave them the opportunity to socialize with peers and colleagues. Asked if she would like to retire, Mariam, a science teacher, said no because “I would become too isolated if I stayed at home.” For Mariam, who did not have her own family nearby, this was particularly significant. However, other teachers, especially those with young children, wished they did not have to work. The existence of extended family nearby to help in caring for children and home influenced women's perspectives on the desirability of working, an important reminder that family is not usually viewed as a burden or an obstacle but rather as a critical support system, particularly when state services are virtually absent.Footnote ⁶⁴

The assumptions that underlie development discourse about gender, education, and development lead to conclusions and assumptions that are too simple to capture the complexity of Nur's experiences. Conflicts can and do exist between economic pressures that force women to work and women's own perceptions of what is valuable and/or powerful. Given economic deterioration in the region and the effects of neoliberal economic policies on the most vulnerable citizens, many women do not have choices about waged labor. However, given the choice, not all want to work; they may find the existing jobs exploitive and disempowering rather than desirable.Footnote ⁶⁵

EDUCATION FOR SECURITY

In this section I draw on my ethnographic research at the al-Khatwa School for Girls in northern Jordan, as well as among the families of the adolescent girls I came to know in the schools to point to possibilities that the AHDR 2005 makes it difficult for a reader to imagine. I do not use this particular city in Jordan and these particular families to speak for the whole region but rather to explore the diversity and complexity of circumstances that might shape the desires and dilemmas tied to getting an education and the range of expectations for a better life connected to such desires.

Going to the university, working, or getting married are among the options for a high school girl looking ahead and trying to ascertain the significance of her education. The benefits of being in school seemed clear to the girls I came to know. They went to school to get out of the house and to be exposed to different people and ideas. The future was more ambiguous. Everyone seemed to agree with the oft-repeated phrase that “a diploma was a weapon in the hands of a girl.” But a weapon for what? Would schooling help them attract a good marriage partner and be a better mother and wife? Would their diploma enable them to work? Would work ensure financial independence or security?

In her discussion about the desire for education in the Old Moshi region of Tanzania, Vavrus argues that it can be explained in part by the “search for security at a time when global capitalism heightens a sense of insecurity.”Footnote ⁶⁶ In many respects, the adolescent girls and families I came to know in Jordan thought very explicitly about education in terms of their long-term security in a time of great economic and sociocultural uncertainty. They most immediately saw their education as critical to securing a “good” marriage, typically a very classed notion. Much along the same lines of an American concept of “marrying up,” girls or their families wanted an educated and professional man of financial means for a groom. In order to marry up, a girl needed to be educated. On one level, this was tied to the belief that an educated man needed an educated woman as a partner in life, to raise his children, and to care for his household.Footnote ⁶⁷ However, some men saw educated and potentially employable brides as desirable given that increasing costs of living had made it difficult for all but the wealthiest families to manage on one salary.

Despite assumptions about the links between a diploma and a girl's future economic and marital security, many Jordanians remain ambivalent about women's work—what type of work is appropriate and whether working outside the home is even desirable. At the al-Khatwa School for Girls I often heard debates about the desirability and even permissibility of women's work.Footnote ⁶⁸ The debates were not limited to the religious acceptability or moral propriety of women's working outside the home, however; they frequently dealt with women's desires, the practical difficulties of working outside the home given household responsibilities, and the limited job opportunities in their locale. A conversation with friends Anwar and Lena about their expectations for the future reveals some of this:

In this conversation, Lena and Anwar allude to multiple considerations in the process of defining ambitions and strategizing about the future. Anwar reminds us how much of a girl's future is determined by her grades because getting the grade is critical in determining if and what a young woman will study beyond high school.Footnote ⁶⁹ A structural constraint not given due attention in the AHDR 2005 is that few females or males really have a choice about the field they will enter; rigid high school completion and/or university entrance exams throughout the region typically funnel students into certain fields depending on academic performance. Furthermore, tracking systems based on academic performance put higher-performing students on the track to math and the sciences early on in their academic careers. In my own research among female high school students in Jordan, grades were clearly a dominant factor in what the young imagined was possible.

Lena's mother was a schoolteacher. She was educated, married to a doctor, and had only one child; she ostensibly did not have to work. For many other women that choice does not exist.Footnote ⁷⁰ Anwar's mother was a widow who took in children to supplement her income. Although Anwar's mother would not be counted in the official labor-force statistics, her work to supplement her dead husband's pension reminds us that crisis, as well as economic circumstances, often leaves women with little choice about supporting their families. Mothers who did not work or who were forced by poverty to work at a number of informal jobs were often vehement about wanting a daughter to go to the university because of the economic hardships they had faced. For some of the women with whom I spoke, the hope was that a daughter would work and be able to gain some financial independence. For others the assumption was that a degree would ensure that she could marry someone better off than her father and maybe not have to work. Some working mothers, tired from work and all the other responsibilities they had to bear, discouraged their daughters from studying to work. Still, they felt that going to the university was important for a daughter's status and future marriage potential. Some families found the coeducational setting of universities threatening to their efforts to maintain the respectability of their daughters and sisters. However, rarely were such reservations separate from other considerations—financial, academic (as in the academic abilities of different girls), or personal, such as divorce, family breakup, or dislocation. All of this is difficult to envision as one reads the AHDR 2005.

Most girls had high hopes for completing their education, but they struggled with the expectations that education created and the shifting realities of women's lives around them. Although schools provide spaces for girls to negotiate conflicting pressures in 21st-century Jordan, they also complicate this process by creating new expectations and placing value on new forms of knowledge and newly constituted status positions. The deterioration of the economic situation in most of the region has closed many doors girls thought had been opened even as, ironically, their participation in the labor force is believed to make them more attractive marriage partners.Footnote ⁷¹ The young women with whom I spoke were cognizant of the restrictions that bound their options—economic, cultural, and personal—and struggled to negotiate the opportunities and limits they faced. The reflections of these young women on the parameters of the possible and the factors that one needed to weigh provide a frame wider than that present in the AHDR 2005.