Educational Attainment and Career Success in the GCC: Does Gender Matter? (original) (raw)

Extensive literature on labor markets has supported the proposition that gender is one of the most common attributes that explains disparity in wages, benefits, promotion, and other organizational achievement indicators. According to several scholars, work organizations can be treated as arenas on which social conflicts between different groups of employees take place. Many acknowledge that women in the GCC area have made great strides in achieving near-equality when it comes to educational attainment. In fact, recent studies by the World Bank and other regional and international agencies have shown that women in a number of GCC countries now constitute a significant percentage of university graduates. The increase in the number of private universities in the Gulf has further allowed women to claim a larger share of the region’s labor market. However, such successes may not have extended from the educational to the labor domain. Much of the existing literature exploring barriers and...