I walked into the first class of the semester. It was early 2007. I had already spent over a year teaching at Shinas College of Technology, watching it grow from a fledgling new addition to Oman’s Ministry of Manpower’s chain of technical colleges across the country. The college started with offering engineering and information technology diplomas along with an English foundation year when it opened in the fall of 2005. By 2007, I had been tasked with shepherding the new business studies program as the acting head of department. But this was not a business class. This was a research methods and communication class for engineering students. The room was full of young female students, most of whom were from the various corners of the Al-Batinah governorate in north Oman. Eager faces looked up from their chairs. It was the first Shinas cohort of engineering students in their last year of the diploma programme. There were two men seated awkwardly between them. Yes, in rural Oman, with students from the growing port city of Sohar, small towns along the coast, and further inland villages across Al-Batinah and Al-Buraimi governorates, the percentage of female engineering students was far higher than I had ever encountered in North American engineering programmes, which even today remain overwhelmingly male. I was inspired. I loved that even in the far corners of the Arabian Peninsula women were defying tired Western stereotypes of their oppression and role in the economy and society.
Their employment opportunities were not as promising. Jobs for engineers at the time were often concentrated in the oil industry, and many required field stays in the desert or offshore. Few women in rural communities, it was thought, would be willing, or have families willing to permit them, to be the only female living in work accommodations and spending nights away from the home. Companies reproduced these excuses without asking female graduates themselves. Moreover, the companies in the growing Sohar Industrial Estates rarely hired young Omanis of any gender, preferring trained expatriates from the Indian subcontinent. I tried several times, unsuccessfully, to arrange internships and work placements for our students there. Companies simply did not want to commit to training local labour even when it was offered through educational schemes. Supervisors were uninterested in local knowledge transfer. The impression among Omanis who did work there, and those who wished to, was that mid-level and senior management, often from South Asia, wanted to hire their own compatriots rather than young Omanis. Omani employees were perceived as threats to expatriate job security. Knowledge transfer and local hiring were usually only discussed in the context of corporate social responsibility – a necessary expense of doing business.
Upon graduation, women were even less likely to find work here. One evening on my way to a later-than-usual meeting in the industrial area, I was stopped from driving through the control gate instead of being waved through. The sun was setting and darkness was beginning to extend across the stretches of concrete blocks and fences ahead. The security guard, looking bored, informed me ‘al-nisāʾ mamnūʿ bi-al-layl’ (women are forbidden at night). I explained I had a meeting and was allowed to pass. It is true, however, that the state has rules (only intermittently implemented), supposedly in the interest of protecting women, that limits their employment during evening or nighttime hours with the exception of some industries like health care. Better job prospects could be found in Muscat, but this would usually mean taking up accommodation during the working week in the capital region. But very often, young women remained frustrated and unemployed for long periods or became busy with building homes and families. Educated young men and women felt alienated from the job market, frustrated by a lack of prospects, and uncomfortable with the few opportunities that were presented.
These anecdotes offer a simple introduction to the many labour market contradictions I was confronted with during the years I first worked in Oman between 2005 and 2008. It also hints at the broader empirical puzzle that shapes my work on the country. Why do economic development plans from the state appear to respond so clearly to labour market problems yet fail so dramatically to address them evenly across sectors? Why are labour market reforms so unevenly adopted and so rapidly changed, while the conditions that restrict young jobseekers’ productive engagement in the economy and alienate them from the private sector persist and continue intensifying? And finally, how can we understand the experiences and range of responses from Omani millennials?
This book addresses these puzzles. It is dedicated to my former students and to the youth of Oman.
