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DEAD SEA, May 21 2005 — As a result of a decisive policy choice by the Government of Jordan, the country has made remarkable progress in improving women’s access to education and health services, the basic building blocks for gender equality. But women still have to overcome barriers in access to opportunities in the public sphere, says a new country gender assessment prepared by the World Bank. “The Economic Advancement of Women in Jordan: A Country Gender Assessment,”launched during the World Economic Forum at the Dead Sea under the patronage of H.E. Suhair Al-Ali, Minister of Planning and International Cooperation, notes that over the last decade the Jordanian government has invested nearly five percent of Gross Domestic Product per year in education and around nine percent per year in health. Both of these levels are above the average rates for countries at the similar income levels as Jordan. Through those sustained investments, Jordan has achieved gender parity in school enrollment at all levels, and is set to achieve the Millennium Development Goals in education by 2005. Female literacy has increased from 69.2 to 91 percent between 1980 and 2002; life expectancy has risen from 66 to 73.6 years and fertility declined from 7 to 3.7 births per woman. Jordan, however, still has further progress to make. Although women’s participation in the formal labor force has more than doubled from what it was in the 1960s, it still is among the lowest rates in the region. Only 26 percent of Jordanian women are economically active mainly due to a range of implicit and explicit factors that discourage women—even educated women—from working outside the home. “Improving women's access to job opportunities, to credit and to equal pay is not only just and fair; it is an effective tool of development in itself—because the benefits will spread faster beyond the individual, to the family and society and to the next generation,” says Mustapha Nabli, World Bank Chief Economist for the Middle East and North Africa. “Evidence shows that the expansion of female labor force participation expands long term potential growth, and that even a small change in the potential growth rate will accumulate into a large difference in living standards when compounded over years and decades.” The report notes that unemployment, which remains high for the public at large, is even higher for women—15 percent for the population as a whole and 25 percent for women. Among the women who work, underemployment is also a problem. The average female wage earner in Jordan is likely to have 12.3 years of education for the job that she performs, compared to 9.3 years of education for a male counterpart holding a similar job. Women also experience some degree of wage discrimination, notes the country gender assessment report. “Jordan’s results on several social indicators are impressive, including women’s high literacy and the bridging of gender gaps in education,”says Nadereh Chamlou, World Bank Senior Advisor on gender for the Middle East and North Africa . “First, by broadening the participation of women in the labor market, companies can recruit from the overall pool of talent and not just from half of it. This under-utilization has a high cost to the economy.” Nabli further explains that gender issues are central to competitiveness and productivity, which is why promoting women’s advancement and nurturing the capabilities of all its citizens is critical if Jordan is to become a competitive knowledge-based economy. This Country Gender Assessment was prepared through a participatory process with a series of dialogues with different stakeholder groups in Jordan. These dialogues provided an opportunity for the World Bank to work with partners in government, civil society, academia and the private sector to define the scope for the assessment and gather information for the analysis.
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