Striving to reach equality

A recent workshop organised by USAID’s Takamol-Gender Programme found that negative stereotyping of women in Jordan can be traced back to schools and school textbooks, as early as at the elementary level of education.

Perhaps gender stereotyping at this early stage is not intentional, but it is there nevertheless, according to the attendees at the workshop.

When schoolchildren are raised to view women as “inferior” to men and to consider that their work must be limited to the domestic roles of wives and mothers, or even to specific professions, like teaching or nursing, for example, there should be no surprises that young Jordanians carry stereotyping of women with them into adulthood.

Participants in the workshop also found that women are employed in a limited number of jobs, some 10 professions out of 120 areas of work available in the local work market.

Even if such findings have a relatively big margin of error — seeing that nowadays women may be found in professions once the domain of men alone, including business, IT, science, medicine, government, diplomacy, politics — the painful truth is that women still have a long way to go before attaining full equality with men.

True, in Jordan the situation is better than in other Arab countries, but there are social and cultural dimensions to the problem that need to be tackled, and that is a long process that needs to be fixed, foremost through education and role models.

The workshop was important because it raised an important issue. It showed that negative stereotyping of women exists and that a lot more needs to be done to enable women to play a productive role in public life.

There is hardly a nation where women enjoy full equality with men. But this should be no reason for Jordan to be complacent.

It is important to work assiduously to correct the matter, knowing that a society that accords women their rightful place is civilised and accomplished, and raises children that can be counted on to contribute to its progress.