Young Muslim women take lead over men in race for degrees

Researchers find Muslim girls are more motivated to gain qualifications to survive in the jobs market

Muslim girls are academically outperforming their male counterparts for the first time, researchers have found.
A “new and remarkable” cultural shift will be revealed this week to the British Sociological Association annual conference, when it hears evidence that more young Muslim women have been gaining degrees at British universities than Muslim men, even though they have been under-represented for decades.

Dr Nabil Khattab of the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies in Qatar, and Professor Tariq Modood of the University of Bristol, found that 25% of Muslim women aged 21-24 now have degrees, compared with 22% of Muslim men of the same age.
After studying the GCSE results of 6,600 candidates in England, the academics also found that average scores in school tests at ages 11 and 14 were higher for Muslim girls than boys.

“Muslim girls seem to be outperforming Muslim boys, especially in relation to their school performance,” said Khattab. “This is very interesting, given what we know about the gender gap among Muslims, not only in education but also in the labour market. While older men are more likely to be degree-holders than their female counterparts, younger women are more likely to have degrees.”

Khattab explained that the trend for girls to outperform boys had been well observed among non-Muslim students for some time. “On the other hand, it is very new among Muslims,” he said. “Nevertheless, that it has happened at all is remarkable when one considers that in 1990 and 1991 Pakistani and Bangladeshi men admitted to higher education outnumbered their female peers by more than two to one and more than three to one respectively.”

Khattab suggested that one possible reason for the change might be the fact that Muslim women, particularly those planning to become economically active after leaving school, appreciated that they were “likely to face labour market penalties due to widespread stereotypes and racism, perhaps more so than Muslim men”.

He explained: “This can reinforce their determination to obtain higher education qualifications not only as good as those of the majority group but even better, in order to resist the anticipated labour market discrimination preventing them from achieving a desired job.”

The findings suggest that the younger generation of Muslim women in Britain mark a distinct break with the past. “It is possible that Muslim women who are British-born, unlike their mothers, have undergone a cultural transformation,” Khattab said.

The academics also suggested that the reason why Muslims overall were less likely to have degrees and attend an elite university than non-Muslim pupils was due to them falling behind at primary school. However, when the data was adjusted to remove the initial deficit, they found that in secondary schools Muslim pupils performed as well as non-Muslim students, and were catching up with them by the time they took GCSEs. “Once we take the previous school performance into account, Muslim students seem to be performing as well as the majority group, even in attending elite Russell Group universities,” they claim.

“At the GCSE level, there was a clear advantage among Muslims. This finding is striking, given the well-established educational disadvantages among some Muslim ethnic groups, most notably Pakistanis and Bangladeshis.”

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/apr/02/Muslim-women-men-degrees-jobs-market-british-universities



Well able to express themselves, even in the hajib lol