Increasing women's participation on corporate boards and in senior management is among the crucial requirements of companies all around the world. IFC is no exception. The authors have seen for ourselves the positive results from greater diversity in corporate leadership. Stated simply, gender balance is good for business. The participation of women in the labor market has been a major driver of growth and competitiveness in economies. Yet, when it comes to corporate leadership positions, there remains a huge gap between the numbers of men and women represented. In Jordan this is no different. Men have assumed the highest positions of corporate leadership, even as women represent a strong untapped asset for the country. Despite constituting a large portion of society in Jordan, women have a minor presence in boardrooms and in senior decision-making positions. The research in this publication sets out to demonstrate: the degree of involvement by women in boardrooms and senior decision-making positions in the corporate world; the value of their presence when they are involved in those positions (specifically whether there is a correlation between women in the boardroom and the financial performance of companies); and some of the challenges that women face in reaching such decision-making positions. The publication also includes some recommendations for ways to overcome those challenges.

In 2005 the World Bank released a gender assessment of the nation of Jordan, a country that, like many in the Middle East, has undergone dramatic social and gender transformations, in part by encouraging equal access to education for men and women. The resulting demographic picture there—highly educated women who still largely stay at home as mothers and caregivers— prompted the World Bank to label Jordan a “gender paradox.” In Gendered Paradoxes, Fida J. Adely shows that assessment to be a fallacy, taking readers into the rarely seen halls of a Jordanian public school—the al-Khatwa High School for Girls—and revealing the dynamic lives of its students, for whom such trends are far from paradoxical. Through the lives of these students, Adely explores the critical issues young people in Jordan grapple with today: nationalism and national identity, faith and the requisites of pious living, appropriate and respectable gender roles, and progress. In the process she shows the important place of education in Jordan, one less tied to the economic ends of labor and employment that are so emphasized by the rest of the developed world. In showcasing alternative values and the highly capable young women who hold them, Adely raises fundamental questions about what constitutes development, progress, and empowerment—not just for Jordanians, but for the whole world.

Essays discussing women's psychological development examine the experiences of women from diverse backgrounds

A diversity of facets in the relationships between gender and space in Jordan come to light throughout this study, highlighting foremost the contentious nature running throughout the relationships between men and women as each gender attempts to shape, expand, and solidify the accepted gender roles and realms of influence within society. The study also exposes the power of issues like assumption, perception, reputation, and religious or cultural fervor in relation to discerning whether men and women can reside in or at least share the same space or whether the tensions between the genders are so great that men and women are foes who cannot peacefully cross the boundaries between spaces. For further insight into this topic of genderized space allocation, boundary maintenance, and power distribution in Jordan, the examination of the relationships between gender and space through the political, economic, educational, religious, and cultural lenses of Jordanian society offers documentation, in powerful terms and images, of the ways each element of society -political, economic, educational, religious, and cultural- supports the idea of fluidity in the boundaries between genderized public and private spaces but, paradoxically, provides even more efficient tools for increasing the rigidity and divisiveness of those same boundaries. Consequently, genders in Jordan remain divided between public and private spaces -a social reality shaped, supported, and enhanced by the interaction between both qualitative, emotion-based elements and tangible, fact-based elements.

"Across the world as here in the US, education and economic opportunity often go hand in hand. But at the same time that education creates opportunities, it can introduce new hurdles for young adults beginning to build their lives. In Working Women in Jordan, anthropologist Fida J. Adely turns to college-educated women in Jordan who migrate from rural provinces to Amman for work. Building on twelve years of ethnographic research in Jordan and extensive interviews with dozens of women, as well as some of their family members, Adely analyzes the effects of developments such as expanded educational opportunities, urbanization, privatization, and the restructuring of the labor market on women's life trajectories, gender roles, the institution of marriage, and kinship relations. Through these diverse stories, Adely tracks meaningful changes in Jordanian society. Jordanian women rarely live apart from their families before marrying, except to attend university; this increase in female mobility, with the support and sometimes encouragement of families, is indicative of significant shifts in gendered expectations. The women Adely profiles are not always motivated to migrate for entirely economic reasons, but also family and personal aspirations, recent family and personal histories, and perceived marriage opportunities. These motivations often come into conflict with one another, however--for example when a family's expectations for financial help compete with personal desires for a more affluent lifestyle. Drawing on the experiences of these young women, as well as extensive analysis of broader socio-economic and demographic shifts, Adely shows how educational structures can act as both facilitators and obstacles to labor force entry. Working Women in Jordan will require us to think more critically about what counts as development, and for whom"--

The Government of Jordan has strengthened its commitment in recent years to gender equality and women's social and economic empowerment through Jordan's Renaissance Plan 2019-2020 and more recently through the preparation of the Women's Economic Empowerment Action Plan under the Mashreq Gender Facility. Furthermore, the Jordan National Commission for Women is coordinating the development of the National Women's Strategy, encompassing the government's vision of women's empowerment and the national plans that address different areas of gender equality. The note touches on societal and household level issues such as existing social norms; the enabling environment provided by the legal framework; specific constraints to women's economic activity that are pronounced in the Jordan context such as access to care provisions and transport; access to entrepreneurship and finance, with a focus on technology-enabled services; and what may be considered to attract more Jordanian women in the rural areas to engage in employment in the agriculture sector. Given the saturation of the public sector in terms of employment, the focus is specifically on areas in which the private sector may play a leading role.