Pew
Skews Study on Muslim Girls' Education
by Abigail R. Esman
Special to IPT News
September 12, 2018
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 When a Taliban
gunman shot Malala Yousafzai, then a 15-year-old student activist in
Pakistan's Swat Valley, it brought long-needed attention to the struggle
for girls' education in Muslim societies. Yousafzai, known internationally
for standing up for the rights of Muslim girls to attend school, was
deliberately targeted in a country where, according to ABC News, "Sixty-two percent of girls and five
percent of boys are not in school," and where, in some districts,
Taliban leaders have forbidden girls to attend school at all.
Now a new Pew study on education among Muslim girls examines the issue
globally in an effort to understand why Muslim women are so often deprived
of schooling. Yet oddly, the findings of the study, presented in Population And Development Review, do not match
up to the brief overview Pew issued on its web site. Indeed,
while the Pew text purports to be a summary of the Population and
Development Review research and report, it frequently misrepresents the
real findings.
Those misrepresentations begin at the top of the summary, written by the
study's co-author Conrad Hackett, who is Pew's associate director of
research and senior demographer, and Dalia Fahmy, a Pew writer who focuses
on religious issues. Its headline: "Education of Muslim Women Is
Limited by Economic Conditions, Not Religion."
But the study itself declares otherwise: "Recent cross-national
studies ... find that the strong correlation between low female attainment
and the Muslim share of the population persists even after accounting for
many economic and structural factors," the authors note.
"Although the measures of educational attainment, religion, and
controls vary from study to study, the basic findings are consistent: countries
where Muslims make up a larger share of the population have lower female
attainment and wider gender gaps, on average." (Emphasis added.)
The authors further cite a 2016 analysis of 143 countries which found
that "countries with larger Muslim shares have lower female enrollment
rates in secondary schooling between 1973 and 2011, after controlling for
GDP per capita, urbanization, public spending on education, political and
civil rights, life expectancy, and wars and natural disasters."
Accordingly, schooling for girls is more restricted in countries likely to
adhere to sharia law than less conservative countries, like Lebanon. In
other words, the less conservative the Islam practiced in a country, the
more likely women will have the right to an education – and vice versa.
This, the authors note, is true across the board, regardless of
"country income, democracy, and oil values."
But if so, this observation makes several other statements from the
researchers' Population and Development Review report also puzzling.
First, if conservative countries restrict education regardless of oil
values, one would expect Saudi women to be barred from schools. Yet
instead, the researchers say Saudi women have made significant gains in
education, putting them, with 11.5 years of schooling, "on par with
Muslim women in Europe and the United States."
Have they really? Other data from a 2016 Pew report shows, rather, that Saudi men have an
average of 10.3 years of schooling, versus 8.1 for women – while in the
U.S., by contrast, Muslim women average of 13.6 years of school, exactly as
many as Muslim men.
So which is true?
In fairness to the authors of the Pew summary, the researchers did find
that economic conditions play a role in development and education in
general: "Development is also associated with greater economic returns
to schooling, boosting demand for schooling," they write, and note
that "Democratic countries also tend to be more supportive of gender
equality and hold more liberal sexual attitudes."
In other words, in countries where democracy is strong – as in the West
– Muslim women more frequently attend school. And those countries tend to be
secular.
Indeed, according to the researchers, "Young Muslim women tend to
have more years of education, on average, in countries where they are a
religious minority than in countries where they make up a majority of the
population." This would seem to be in keeping with the actual numbers
shown in the raw data, where American and European Muslim women enjoy far
better educational opportunities than they do in Muslim countries. If this
is correct, democratization and secularization are more significant than
economic factors.
That said, the Pew study indicates that Muslim women are making gains.
The gap between girls' and boys' education throughout much of the Muslim
world is shrinking, with the exception of deeply Islamized countries such
as Iraq, Yemen, and Afghanistan.
So why the misleading summary report on Pew's site? Is it indeed true
that "a country's wealth – not its laws or culture – is the most
important factor in determining a women's educational fate" – or do
cultures and laws that encourage equality of the sexes and reward education
for women have more to do with it? How much is the advance in educational
opportunities for Muslim women, however minor, the result of world change
generally, of globalization and of the growing development of much of the
Middle East? And why the lead statement that religion is not what limits
educational opportunities for young Muslim girls, particularly when the
data shows specifically that Christian girls in many of the same countries
(like Nigeria) experience up to three times as much schooling as Muslims?
Far better would have been to suggest that religion is not the only
factor involved in oppressing women through lack of education in these
countries. It's an important distinction, not only because it recognizes the
role religion plays, but because it would state clearly what the research
shows: that other factors are also in play, that Islam itself is not
entirely to blame, that there is hope for a brighter future for Muslim
women.
This is why it is not just the manipulation of facts, the dishonesty,
that makes this Pew summary report so disturbing. Far worse is its
perpetuation of the problem. Throwing money at Muslim communities is not
what is going to help empower Muslim girls and women. But if the research is
correct, international support for a more moderate, reform Islam and the
advancement of secular democracy, will.
Abigail R. Esman, the author, most recently, of Radical State: How Jihad Is Winning Over Democracy in
the West (Praeger, 2010), is a freelance writer based in New
York and the Netherlands. Follow her at @radicalstates.
Related Topics: Education
| Abigail
R. Esman, Malala
Yousafzai, Taliban,
women's
education, Pew
poll, Dalia
Fahmy, Conrad
Hackett, democracies,
economic
conditions, Population
and Development Review, Education
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