The Middle East Beats the West In Female Tech Founders

PolygamousRanchKid writes with this except from the Economist: "Only 10% of internet entrepreneurs across the world are women, according to Startup Compass, a firm that tracks such things. Except in Amman and other Middle Eastern cities, it seems. There, the share of women entrepreneurs is said to average 35% — an estimate seemingly confirmed by the mix of the sexes at 'Mix'n'Mentor,' a recent gathering in the Jordanian capital organised by Wamda, an online publication for start-ups. Reasons abound, and they are not always positive, says Nina Curley, Wamda's editor. Although more than half of university graduates in many Middle Eastern countries (51% in Jordan) are women, the workforce is dominated by men (women provide only 21% of it overall, and a paltry 16% in Jordan). The internet, however, is a new space that is more meritocratic and not as heavily male. The technology also lets entrepreneurs work from home, making it easier to raise children."

Comments

Re:Oh yeah?

[Anonymous Coward]

Says the person who uses arabic numerals instead of the more cultured roman ones.

Arab potential

[EmperorOfCanada]

Up to about the years 1200-1400 the Arab world was pretty cool. While we Europeans were living in an age appropriately designated the Dark Ages much of the Arab world was doing cool math, Cool science, Exploration, trade, arts, and medicine. They were fairly tolerant of other religions and were one of the few bright spots on this planet. Then around 800 years ago it all seems to have gone wrong. "Trouble in the Middle East" has been a newspaper headline since the invention of the newspaper. Personally I would love to know what changed 800 years ago as it might give a clue as to how to make it right again. Maybe lots of female internet entrepreneurs is a step in that direction. I wonder if there were more female entrepreneurs in the middle east 1000 years ago?

So all I can say is good luck!

Re:Arab potential

[dkleinsc]

If by "tolerant of other religions" means "forcing other religious groups to pay a poll tax" then I guess that's true.

Meanwhile, in most of Europe, the Christians were busy killing anyone who disagreed with them, sometimes with spectacular methods like burning at the stake. Yes, paying a tax was far more religiously tolerant than their contemporaries.

Re:Arab potential

[girlintraining]

Then around 800 years ago it all seems to have gone wrong. "Trouble in the Middle East" has been a newspaper headline since the invention of the newspaper. Personally I would love to know what changed 800 years ago as it might give a clue as to how to make it right again.

I know I'm going to get mod-bombed to hell and gone for this, but christianity happened. There's an old African proverb, "Once we had the land and the white man had the bible. Now we have the bible and the white man has the land." The Arabs were busy unlocking scientific secrets and storing up knowledge during that time out of necessity -- it's not a forgiving land. It has limited resources, and if you aren't smart about managing it, you die. Generations of resource scarcity meant that their culture stressed history. The first written languages came from the same region. Moving from a barter economy to a cash economy also came from there. And the thing is, this knowledge was shared -- it wasn't kept secret, or considered blasphemous per-se. Not like it was in Europe where the idea that the Earth wasn't the center of the universe nearly got Copernicous nailed to a cross anyway.

The Christians made numerous attempts to send armies into their lands -- and failed each time. But although the military campaign failed, the cultural changes that contact with them brought was ruinous to their civilization in the long-run. Think of it as being a bit like how America reacted to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 -- they really hadn't much exposure to terrorism before, so their first real taste of it caused a massive overreaction that has crippled the economy, sent millions into poverty, and triggered far-reaching changes in their way of life. But in reality, it was just a couple dozen guys who knocked down a few buildings. It did more damage though than fifty hurricanes.

There's plenty of other historical examples too -- Japan and China's isolationist policies, for example. When America steamed into Japan, they forced them to open their borders, and thousands of years of culture caught fire and burned in a matter of years. Similar things have happened to China repeatedly when people have crossed the mountains into their territory.

Cultural contamination is what brought them down -- specifically, from European christians.

Re:Arab potential

[Nimey]

No, it was really the Mongols sacking Baghdad that brought an end to the Islamic golden age and the rise of fundamentalism.

It's not unparalleled - in the Old Testament we see incidents of the Jews picking fights with bigger countries, losing, and deciding that they had lost because they'd been too socially liberal so they'd lost their god's backing, followed by a wave of fundamentalism.

Re:Arab potential

[tnk1]

You are viewing the history from a slanted angle. Yes, there were Crusades, but so too were there significant inroads by the Turks and Arabs before them into Europe. Recall that most of the Middle East was a set of Christian Eastern Roman Empire provinces when the Arabs attacked in the 7th Century. Christianity didn't "happen" to the Muslims, Islam happened to the Christians. It's just that they were fighting back ever since.

Aside from in Spain, the most territory that the Crusaders every got their hands on was between the First and Second Crusades in the late 11th to early 12th Centuries. By 1250 or so, the Crusader states were pretty much history.

On the other hand, the Turks steadily attacked into Anatolia and the Balkans well into the 17th Century, and were still considered a major threat into the 18th. Constantinople fell in 1453. Trebizond in 1461. And Vienna was under siege in 1683. All of these moves were aggressive Ottoman actions into the heart of Christian Europe.

Please don't get the impression that some Christians with red crosses on their tabards spelled the end of Islamic civilization. Ottoman and Arab society in general broke down under it's own weight, and they had plenty of time at the top, despite some petty Crusader states that barely controlled the cost of Palestine.

Dr. Tyson has a fairly good bit on it

[Sycraft-fu]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1te01rfEF0g

In particular the part you are interested in starts at 23:45, though the overall segment starts at around 19:20.

The short version? Religious fundamentalism.

Re:Oh yeah?

[Xtifr]

Says the person who uses arabic numerals instead of the more cultured roman ones.

Except, of course, that the name is somewhat of a misnomer; since they actually come from India, and are known as "Hindu numbers" in the middle east.

Re:gender/class/ comfort

[Anonymous Coward]

Just how many women are raped in computer games?
I know what you're thinking: just 1 woman is 1 too many. And you'd be right in thinking that.

But in contrast 99.9% of victims in computer games are men, and these men are routinely:

* eaten alive
* burnt
* drowned
* cut in two
* shot by regular guns
* shot by plasma rifles
* shot by arrows / javelins
* blown-up
* stabbed
* crushed
* ejected into the vacuum of space
* ripped apart
* dropped into acid
* electrocuted ... shall I go on?

You see, men are the disposable gender. Society is hyper-sensitive to violence against women (oh noes, that scene implied that the woman was going to be raped) but doesn't react to violence against men.

Heck, even "Funniest Home Videos" -- a show aimed at the whole family -- routinely shows clips of men being struck in the testicles. Could you imagine a regular segment dedicated to women having elongated objects thrust against their vaginas? With canned laughter played in the background?

You are right about one thing, redwagonfive: there are double-standards in this world.

Re:4. ???

[icebike]

Breastpounding of this being a western influence aside, if the times for women to be tech founders in the ME is now, then as a result it will be more popular and more will do it (and this is all good) but that does not mean it is a lasting effect, it could level out much lower than in the west or it could level out much higher, only time will tell - but for now we should be happy for the people who now have one more choice of path to make their life better.

Large percentages of the ME men, (yes, even in fairly tame countries like Jordan) have been shunted off to jihadism or the armies that attempt to control it. So they have had a decade of war (or closer to two decades), with disproportionate male losses.

Meanwhile the women start "companies", although the story says "Many firms run by women entrepreneurs deal with what are labelled female issues (weddings, parenting advice, recipes, and web businesses)". So other than keeping other women entertained, these are hardly the same thing as running industry, developing resources or running banks.

If you count these empty-afternoon enterprises as business you have to realize that this kind of stuff doesn't even get counted in the west. (And in the US you can't even tell except by inspecting first names if businesses are owned by men or women, gender tagging business licenses just isn't done).

It seems likely, when when the ME men settle down and stop trying to force Islam on the world, they will start forcing it on their families, and this "trend" of female entrepreneurship will disappear.

When you can look at a news photo of an Arab street and see 50/50 ratio of men to women (instead of 100males to 1), call me. Because until then, all the filling of afternoons while the children are at school with pretend companies means nothing.

Re:I'll take a shot.

[_xen]

Not to argue that the Crusades did not contribute (they clearly did), but your list omits the Mongol conquest of Baghdad in 1258, which is generally reckoned to be the end of the Arabic Golden Age.

Also a few entries on your list --e.g. the Wendish, Northern and Albigensian Crusades --probably had little influence on the Middle East.

Re:4. ???

[phantomfive]

I have a friend from Korea, he told me, "My grandpa always forced my mom to eat at a separate table from the men, until she started making the money. Then she didn't give him any until she could eat at the normal table." Now that tradition has disappeared from Korea.

Making money is one potential road towards equality.

Different culture

[Anonymous Coward]

I live in a third-world country where there is a similar phenomenon.

We have a huge number of female entrepreneurs here - many of them are extremely successful even by Western standards, and many more earn a Western wage in a poor country, which gives them an extremely comfortable standard of living.

What is the secret? It's largely down to motivation. The concept of family is extremely important here - much more so for women than for men. If a woman gets pregnant and has a child, the husband/boyfriend can leave without any financial consequences, and few social consequences.

Women in general (in this country) are much more driven to help their parents, sibilings, children and extended family than their male equivalents (on average, of course). Men are still generally the biggest wage earners, and hold the top positions in most big companies, but women rule the world of small and family businesses.

I am not saying it is fair or correct, but the absence of sexual equality and a benefits system here has had some interesting consequences. I'm not trying to give my opinion about sexual politics, just commenting on how things work here from my day-to-day personal experience. Counter-intuitively, inequality here has led to a large group of middle class female entrepreneurs. Perhaps a similar effect is in action in the Middle East.

Re:Different culture

[Velex]

This is interesting.

Coincidentally we seem to have the opposite situation over here. Women can choose to start families whenever they want with little regard for how they'll support their children, and they can also shut out the father from her life entirely with little to no consequences, both financially and socially. If she chooses to shut the father out of her life, we're more than happy to garnish his wages (no financial consequences whatsoever), and because women have the privilege of being presumed the victim, we'll even tell him that he must have done something abusive to get shut out (so perhaps that would be considered an opposite social consequence since we'll say good on her for throwing out somebody who just must have been a deadbeat).

I work in a predominantly female environment. Sexism isn't limited to the male gender. Go back and re-read that before you moderate. Women have the privilege of being seen as above sexism---as the victims of sexism even, which women have the privilege of painting as a problem exclusively the fault of "all men," but women are people, too.

I know the plural of anecdote is not data, but here's my anecdote anyway. I work in a call center, and when we upgraded our message taking software to a scripted system, I was promoted as a programmer. Drama ensued because customer service could no longer make changes to the questions we ask callers. So, I said, let's sit down and I'll teach you basic programming so that you can make changes again. We tried. And we tried. And we tried. And at the end of it, I found myself teaching remedial algebra and trying to overcome these women's math phobia. So, we scrapped it altogether, and I got a nice, secure job.

The fallout of that, though, was that it came to be believed that somehow, because I'm forced to work as the male gender (another topic entirely and beyond the scope of this discussion), and because we know that "all men" are sexist (and that statement somehow isn't sexist), that the failure of my co-workers to learn how to make even very basic changes such as adding or removing a prompt was definitive proof that I was doing something or had set the system up somehow in a way that was sexist and an inaccessible to the female mind.

I admit, I'm not the best teacher. That's why I don't teach for a living.

What flabbergasted me was the ways that the womyn-born-womyn entitlement complex, as I've come to call it (very different from the "princess entitlement complex" that MRAs go on about---I'm not attracted to women, don't date women, am not interested in the reasons MRAs seek mail-order brides, and the term "womyn-born-womyn entitlement complex" is intended to be completely separate from romantic relationships) prevented my co-workers from learning. Then when I start throwing corner cases and unexpected input at her program, I'm presumed to be just mean and putting up sexist barriers and going hard on them just because they're women. I'm sorry, no. Users will do whatever they can to break what you wrote, and if what you want is to be able to make changes that don't just utterly foul up a message script, then you need to step off your entitlement complex high horse and start taking a more humble approach. But not, it's just easier to call me sexist, because my legal gender is male and all men are sexist, so obviously I, individually, am sexist, and walk off in a huff.

What it came down to, and what it's come down to in other attempts of mine to help women out who are taking CS classes, is that they suppose that the computer can take vaguely worded requirements and know on its own how to do what she meant, much the same way her boyfriend or husband will know what she wants.

I mean, it's just, excuse me, but didn't Ada Lovelace specifically say that wouldn't be the case? I look back on this history of CS, and I see women like Ada Lovelac

Middle East or just Jordan?

[styrotech]

Middle eastern countries are a somewhat diverse bunch in terms of overall attitudes. I can imagine quite a large difference in how well women do overall in say somewhere like Lebanon vs Saudi Arabia.

I didn't notice any links in the TFA, but they only really mentioned (vaguely) stuff from Jordan. I don't think Jordan is at the Saudi end of the scale here.

Re:Middle East or just Jordan?

[shervinemami]

Actually I worked in a university in United Arab Emirates near the border of Oman, and there were about 10x more females studying IT & post-grad in computer or engineering related fields than male students!

We assume it is because the local Emirati's in UAE are so rich that they don't need to study or work, but since females are expected to marry and become a house-wife & mother, the most obvious way for them to not have that way of life is if they become a professional. so we believe this explained why UAE has so many female IT & Engineering students of high quality, but almost no male IT or Engineering students and most of the males there are of very low quality since they are just doing it for fun.

Re:4. ???

[mjr167]

That is where the US was just over 50 years ago. We had a male labor shortage during the world wars and when the men came home and the fighting stopped, the women didn't go home. They started attending college for home economics so they could get jobs as teachers, decorators, party planners, institution management, and other "soft" jobs.

Once the fighting stops and the men go home, you won't see things go back to the way they were. Societies do not change overnight. You do not wake up one morning and redefine an entire social structure. It took us the better part of a century and we can expect it to take them just as long.

BTW, there are plenty of people in the U.S. "filing afternoons while the children are at school" and the money those companies make is not pretend. You can knock things like wedding planning all you want, but the reality is that brides are willing to pay people thousands of dollars to show up for an afternoon's work. You and I may think the work is stupid and silly, but the money is real. A friend of mine's wife is a wedding planner and it is insane how much money she gets paid just for in-law wrangling.