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MIDDLE EAST |
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The Internet is a new force that is only recently starting to reach the Middle Eastern and North African region in a significant way. This technology offers new and potentially important opportunities for women and their role in society. The impact of the Internet on women is not yet clear, but will be determined by how well opportunities are exploited -- and challenges overcome.
Throughout the region, socio-cultural and religious norms may restrict women's access to IT. Women may be uncomfortable frequenting a cyber café with predominantly male users or seeking help from male staff at a cyber café. Cultural norms discourage interaction between women and men outside their family, and women may also be unfamiliar with and uncomfortable interacting with men, due to sex-segregation within society as a whole. Because men dominate IT, this of course would not be conducive to women's undertaking careers in these fields.
Similarly, while women have attained a fairly high level of education, the predominantly male pool of professors and teachers in IT-related subjects may deter women from studying these subjects. For example, female students in an undergraduate university may be uncomfortable with male instructors in their engineering and computer science classes, because they have been accustomed to female instructors throughout their primary and secondary education. This can be even more of a problem when training involves physical tasks, close interpersonal interactions with instructors and classrooms with few females.
Based on these challenges, girls and women in the Middle East are likely to gain access to information technologies if they are educated in the proper environment and the necessary IT infrastructure is established. Nonetheless, awareness raising among women and families on the opportunities for women in the IT job market is needed, in order to ensure that women are seeking IT training and then applying it to IT jobs. In light of this, Cisco Learning Institute (CLI) has launched its gender program to recruit and retain more women into this field.
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