Author's Note: An earlier version of this paper was first presented at Columbia University in February 2007 for a panel entitled “Empowering Arab Women? Assessing the Arab Human Development Report.” I thank Toni Sethi for inviting me to be a part of this panel. Some of the ideas in the introduction were presented as part of a lecture I gave at the launching of the Clovis and Hala Maksoud Chair in Arab Studies at Georgetown University in October 2007. This lecture was published as an Occasional Paper by the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University in the fall of 2008. An earlier version of this paper was also presented at the Middle East Studies Association annual meeting in November 2007, and I am grateful for the comments and feedback of co-panelists and audience members at each of these events. I also thank Lila Abu-Lughod, Betty Anderson, Frances Hasso, Mervat Hatem, and three anonymous IJMES reviewers for vital comments on earlier versions of this paper. The ethnographic work I draw upon in this article was made possible through a Fulbright Islamic Scholars Grant.

² ul Haq, Mahbub, Reflections on Human Development (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 14Google Scholar.

³ This initial report was followed annually by a new global human development report, each new release grappling with a new dimension of human development, with topics ranging from gender to democracy to technology and human rights. The UNDP's Human Development Report Office maintains a website (http://hdr.undp.org) with information about the global reports as well as national human development reports that have been developed by select countries.

⁴ I am indebted to Mervat Hatem for reminding me that the discourse of choices in and of itself was not necessarily a departure from the essential components of earlier development discourse.

⁵ Sen, Amartya, Development as Freedom (New York: Random House, 1999), 75Google Scholar.

⁶ Ibid., 62.

⁷ Ibid., 63.

⁸ Nussbaum, Martha, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹ Nussbaum, , “Capabilities as Fundamental Entitlements: Sen and Social Justice,” Feminist Economics 9 (2003): 33–59, 34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁰ Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 5.

¹¹ In their recent work on educated and un- or underemployed males in northern India, Jeffrey, Jeffrey, and Jeffrey have argued that the emphasis on capabilities, such as education, as drivers for change can “divert attention away from social struggles over the values and uses of education in situations of economic uncertainty.” Jeffrey, Craig, Jeffery, Patricia, and Jeffrey, Roger, Degrees without Freedom? Education, Masculinities and Unemployment in Northern India (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008), 8Google Scholar.

¹² I put “Arab women” in quotes here because one key concern about such reports is the way in which “Arab women” become a category that is essentialized as some homogenous group without sufficient attention to class differences, rural/urban disparities, and so forth. The body of scholarship critiquing this essentialization of Third World women or the feminine other has a long history aided in large part by postcolonial theory and its call for the interrogations of such representations. Within feminist scholarship, Chandra Mohanty's work in this vein has been seminal. Mohanty, Chandra, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” Boundary 2, no. 12 (1984): 333–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Hasso, Frances S., “Empowering Governmentalities Rather than Women: The Arab Human Development Report 2005 and Western Development Logics,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 41 (2009): 63–82 (this issue)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹³ For a review of this research, see Watkins, Kevin, Oxfam Education Report (Oxford, U.K.: Oxfam Publishing, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and LeVine, Robert, LeVine, Sarah, and Schnell, Beatrice, “Improve the Woman”: Mass Schooling, Female Literacy, and Worldwide Social Change,” Harvard Educational Review 71 (2001): 1–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁴ Watkins, Oxfam Education Report.

¹⁵ King, Elizabeth M. and Hill, M. Ann, Women's Education in Developing Countries: Barriers, Benefits, and Policies (Baltimore, Md.: John Hopkins University Press, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Watkins, Oxfam Education Report.

¹⁶ LeVine et al., “Improve the Woman”; Watkins, Oxfam Education Report.

¹⁷ For a critique of this perspective, see Vavrus, Frances, Desire and Decline: Schooling amid Crisis in Tanzania (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2003)Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Watkins, Oxfam Education Report.

¹⁹ Ibid.; LeVine et al., “Improve the Woman.”

²⁰ World Bank, Gender and Development in the Middle East and North Africa: Women in the Public Sphere (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2004), 1Google Scholar.

²¹ World Bank, Gender and Development, 1–2.

²² World Bank, The Economic Advancement of Women in Jordan: A Country Gender Assessment (Washington, D.C.: Social and Economic Development Group, Middle East and North Africa Region, 2005)Google Scholar.

²³ UNDP, AHDR 2005, i.

²⁴ Bayat, Asef, “Transforming the Arab World: The Arab Human Development Report and the Politics of Change,” Development Practice 36 (2005): 1225–37, 1230Google Scholar.

²⁵ Kamran Ali's research on family-planning programs in Egypt is informative here. He argues that despite a family-planning discourse on helping women achieve their rights as individuals to make choices related to their bodies and fertility, “choices are determined by a medical discourse and practice linked to the development agenda.” Ali, Kamran, Planning the Family in Egypt: New Bodies, New Selves (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 2002), 60Google Scholar.

²⁶ See Fagerlind, Ingemar and Saha, Lawrence, Education and National Development, 2nd ed. (New York: Pergamon, 1989)Google Scholar for a discussion about mass public schooling as a very contemporary notion. For example, in the United States and Great Britain, the notion of providing public education to the masses only took off in earnest in the 20th century after much public debate about whether the masses need to be educated and for what purposes.

²⁷ UNDP, AHDR 2005, 73.

²⁸ Ibid., 7.

²⁹ Education is almost always synonymous with formal schooling in the report. However, in at least one instance, literacy rates for females over fifteen are used as a proxy for levels of education in the Arab world. The use of literacy rates as an indicator of levels of education and progress in the expansion of educational access is problematic given that the educational development efforts of countries are typically targeted toward children and illiteracy is most prevalent among older age cohorts, reflecting the limited educational opportunities available historically. See Farah, Nadia, “Arab Women's Development: How Relevant are UNDP Measurements?” Middle East Policy XIII (2006): 38–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁰ Timothy Mitchell makes an analogous critique of development documents and their representation of the “overpopulation” problem in Egypt, arguing that is often unclear to what “over” is referring. Mitchell, Timothy, “America's Egypt: Discourse of the Development Industry,” Middle East Report 169 (1991): 18–34, 36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³¹ UNDP, AHDR 2005, 74. The reader has only to move on to the next page to figures 2–5, which display female enrollment as a percentage of male enrollment at all levels of education. According to the data in this figure, half of the twenty countries for which data are provided have an equal ratio of girls to boys. Furthermore, in nine Arab countries the ratio of females is greater than that of males, and in five countries the gap between females and males is less than 10 percent.

³² Ibid., 76.

³³ UNDP, AHDR 2004, 235.

³⁴ Central Intelligence Agency, The World Fact Book, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/cn.html (accessed 18 October 2007).

³⁵ UNESCO Institute for Statistics, http://stats.uis.unesco.org/unesco/TableViewer/document.aspx?ReportId=121&IF_Language=eng&BR_Country=2620&BR_Region=40525 (accessed 30 September 2008).

³⁶ Carr-Hill, Roy, “Educational Services and Nomadic Groups in Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda,” in The Education of Nomadic Peoples: Current Issues, Future Prospects, ed. Dyer, Caroline (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2006), 50Google Scholar.

³⁷ UNDP, AHDR 2005, 77.

³⁸ According to the World Bank, the gross secondary-school enrollment in Yemen was 60 percent for males and 26 percent for females in 2004–5, http://www.ds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/WDSP/IB/2008/02/28/000333038_20080228234736/Rendered/PDF/417730PAD0P0891ly10IDA1R20081003611.pdf (accessed 30 September 2008). Yemen had the largest gender gap of these three countries. For Djibouti, gross secondary enrollment was 27 percent for males and 18 percent for females in 2006 (UNESCO Institute for Statistics). In Mauritania, the gross secondary-school enrollment was 27 percent for boys and 23 percent for girls in 2006, http://stats.uis.unesco.org/unesco/TableViewer/document.aspx?ReportId=121&IF_Language=eng&BR_Country=4780&BR_Region=40525 (accessed 30 September 2008).

³⁹ UNESCO, Institute for Statistics, 2005.

⁴⁰ Lewis, Maureen and Lockheed, Marlaine, Inexcusable Absence: Why 60 Million Girls Still Aren't In School and What to Do About It (Washington, D.C.: Center for Global Development, 2007)Google Scholar. Although Lewis and Lockheed set out to write a book about girls' exclusions, their focus on issues surrounding “excluded sub-groups” of various types points to a barrier that goes beyond gender, although it may be compounded by gender.

⁴¹ Ibid., 32.

⁴² UNDP, AHDR 2005, 79.

⁴³ Ibid.

⁴⁴ Ibid.

⁴⁵ Engineering Workforce Commission, Engineering and Technology Enrollments: Fall 2005 (Washington, D.C.: American Association of Engineering Societies, Engineering Workforce Commission, 2006)Google Scholar.

⁴⁶ Ibid.

⁴⁷ The superiority accorded to particular fields of study, namely, the scientific, medical, and technological fields, is consistent in the development literature on education. In the most recent World Bank report about education in the Middle East and North Africa, one of the key indicators used in the bank's assessment of educational quality in the region is the number of students enrolled in the sciences, engineering, and medicine. World Bank, The Road Not Traveled: Education Reform in the Middle East and North Africa (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2008)Google Scholar.

⁴⁸ UNDP, AHDR 2005, 91.

⁴⁹ Another important expected choice discussed in the report is participation in the political sphere, with politics narrowly defined as participation through election to office. In both respects—economic and political—the decision to frame women's development and proper use of human capabilities in such a manner precipitates and reproduces the ways in which traditionally male activities are given greater value, UNDP, AHDR 2005; Abu-Lughod, Lila, “Dialects of Women's Empowerment: The International Circuitry of the Arab Human Development Report 2005,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 41 (2009): 83–103 (this issue)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁰ See Hoodfar, Hoda, Between Marriage and the Market: Intimate Politics and Survival in Cairo (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

⁵¹ Almost across the board, development documents and the broader literature on women's labor-force participation acknowledge the limits of official statistics in capturing the true extent of women's economic contributions, let alone their important labor in maintaining households and families. Yet these documents continue to make assessments about the status of women's development and economic opportunity based on these limited categories, data, and definitions of work—and in some instances explicitly devalue forms of work that are not easily measured. See Farah, “Arab Women's Development.”

⁵² UNDP, AHDR 2005, 79.

⁵³ A recent phenomenon in the United States makes a useful comparison here. In response to decreasing male enrollment in undergraduate institutions, some U.S. universities have unofficially begun lowering the standards for male applicants. See Jennifer D. Britz, “To All the Girls I Have Rejected,” New York Times, 23 March 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/23/opinion/23britz.html?_r=1&oref=slogin (accessed 30 September 2008); John Tierney, “On Campus, A Good Man is Hard to Find,” New York Times, 25 March 2006, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A0DE3D81730F936A15750C0A9609C8B63 (accessed 30 September 2008); Tamar Lewin, “At Colleges Women are Leaving Men in the Dust,” New York Times, 9 July 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/09/education/09college.html?scp=1&sq=At+Colleges+Women+are+Leaving+Men+in+the+Dust&st=nyt (accessed 30 September 2008).

⁵⁴ UNDP, AHDR 2005, 83.

⁵⁵ For an earlier construction of the Arab family in these terms, see Sharabi, Hisham, Neopatriarchy: A Theory of Distorted Change in Arab Society (New York: University Press, 1988)Google Scholar.

⁵⁶ Abu-Lughod, “Dialects of Women's Empowerment.”

⁵⁷ Olmsted, Jennifer, “Is Paid Work the (Only) Answer? Women's Well-Being, Neoliberalism, and the Social Contract in Southwest Asia and North Africa,” Journal of Middle East Women's Studies 2 (2005): 112–39, 112, 131Google Scholar.

⁵⁸ Linda Hirshman, “Off to Work She Should Go,” New York Times, 25 April 2007. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/25/opinion/25hirshman.html?_r=1&oref=slogin (accessed 30 September 2008).

⁵⁹ “Change the World and That Diaper,” letter to the editor, New York Times, 27 April 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/27/opinion/l27work.html?_r=1&oref=slogin (accessed 30 September 2008).

⁶⁰ Hirshman, “Off to Work She Should Go.”

⁶¹ “Change the World and That Diaper.”

⁶² My research was based in northern Jordan in a city of about 30,000 people. I conducted ethnographic research primarily in one secondary school, visited and interviewed families of the adolescent girls with whom I interacted daily, and spent a significant amount of time visiting, speaking with, and interviewing teachers, the overwhelming majority of whom were women from the local community.

⁶³ All names of people and places are pseudonyms.

⁶⁴ See Olmsted, “Is Paid Work the (Only) Answer?” as well as Hatem, Mervat, “In the Shadow of the State: Changing Definitions of Arab Women's Developmental Citizenship Rights,” Journal of Middle East Women's Studies 1 (2005): 20–45Google Scholar.

⁶⁵ Some local governments have pursued a policy of promoting employment for lower-income women in low-wage manufacturing jobs in newly constructed “free-trade zones.” The low wages and the exploitive nature of many of these jobs leave them less than desirable and not always economically viable. For an argument about the importance of such low-wage jobs for female entry into the labor force, see Moghadam, Valentine, “Women's Economic Participation in the Middle East: What Difference Has the Neoliberal Policy Turn Made?” Journal of Middle East Women's Studies 1 (2005): 110–46Google Scholar. For perspectives on why such jobs may not be desirable and/or economically desirable, see Hoodfar, Between Marriage and the Market.

⁶⁶ Vavrus, Desire and Decline, 10.

⁶⁷ This perspective on the education of women has its roots in a modernizing discourse that is more than a century old, one that also has had distinct implications for the conceptualization of marriage. See Abu-Lughod, Lila, ed., Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁸ Adely, Fida, “The Mixed Effects of Schooling for High School Girls in Jordan: The Case of Tel Yahya,” Comparative Education Review 48 (2004): 353–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁹ In the twelfth grade, Jordanian students take the tawjihi, or high school completion exam. (The term also refers to twelfth grade itself.) Their score determines if they can study in a public university and what major they can choose. Students and families held a great deal of anxiety about this exam, given its role in deciding one's future and given that only about half of twelfth graders pass the exam. Furthermore, passing does not guarantee admission to a public university. In 2006, for example, of the 54,000 students who passed the exam, only 28,000 gained admission to public universities. Mohammad Ghazal, “Girls Take Top Spots in Six Streams of Exam,” Jordan Times, 30 July 2006. Today in Jordan, as in several Arab countries, one increasingly finds private options for higher education, but the cost is too prohibitive for the majority of citizens.

⁷⁰ See Mervat Hatem on the “middle-class ideal that dealt with work as a choice” in her comparison of secular and Islamist discourses on women's work. She argues that their positions are both based on this ideal. “Egyptian Discourses on Gender and Political Liberalization: Do Secularist and Islamist Discourses Really Differ?” Middle East Journal 48 (1994): 661–76, 670.

⁷¹ The barriers to accessing economic opportunities that education is assumed to provide have distinct class dimensions and are not solely a female phenomena. In many respects, because of the “breadwinner” expectations tied to masculinity in many parts of the world, limited economic opportunities and access to stable jobs even for schooled men present a male educational crisis. See Jeffrey et al., Degrees without Freedom?

⁷² Abu-Lughod, “Dialects of Women's Empowerment.”

⁷³ Vavrus, Desire and Decline, 7.