Introduction
The participation of women in engineering undergraduate programs and in the workforce in numerous Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries stands in contrast to the systematically low proportions of female engineers in the United States (US) and numerous western European countries. Across most of the GCC nation-states, women attain degrees at the tertiary level at near parity to male students, and they participate in engineering undergraduate studies at significant rates (Charles 2011). Although this varies by engineering discipline and by GCC country, and although this balance is less equal in some sectors of the workforce, the participation of women in the technical innovation enterprise has been an important component of growth in the GCC (Al Masah Capital Management Limited 2012; Shehadi et al. 2011).
This has not always been the case. Women's participation in economic, educational, and political arenas in GCC countries has been historically low, primarily due to socio-cultural factors influencing laws and policies that have hindered involvement in the public sphere. Over the last quarter century, as attitudes and policies have changed, so has women's representation in these arenas. Yet, in spite of these changes, the female participation rate in the general workforce in the GCC stands at 27%. Again, their overall participation remains at just over one-quarter of the workforce even though women graduate from college or university at higher rates than men in the GCC and also at higher rates than women outside the GCC (Shehadi et al. 2011). Women in Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE, Oman, and Saudi Arabia represented 67%, 62%, 60%, 59%, and 57%, respectively, of their nation's university graduates in 2009 (UIS 2015). As a comparison, in the same year, women comprised 58% of graduates in the US and 57% in the United Kingdom (UIS 2015). This pool of highly educated women in the GCC, including many engineers, is an underutilized resource that, if leveraged, could greatly benefit the region's economic, political, and societal spheres.
Why is the study of women's participation in engineering across countries important? Further exploration into the multi-faceted core causes of gender disparity in education and the workforce are necessary because such disparities:
1. limit the educational, career, and life opportunities of both boys and girls;
2. promote “separate but equal” distribution principles that frequently do not result in equal pay or power; and
3. prevent women from filling the growing global shortage of technical expertise (Charles and Bradley 2009).