Gender Equality: The Role Of Women In Oman

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Although the proportion of women in the workplace has increased remarkably within the past few decades, women remain vastly underrepresented at the highest organizational levels. Women in our days choose to get educated and pursue careers. To do this most of them have to learn to deal with dual roles; the role of the employee and the role of mother/wife. The majority of them have managed to move from working at the traditionally female occupations (such as teachers and nurses) to male-dominated areas such as managers and engineers (Apospori et al., 2006; Wirth, 2001;Krambia-Kapardi 2006). Furthermore, gender equality is a fundamental principle fordemocratic countries; women and men should participate as equals in the social, cultural and economic …show more content…

We call upon Omani women to shoulder this vital role in the community and we are confident that they will respond to this call" (Al Khaduri, 2007, p. …show more content…

Therefore, many employers assume that these roles will interfere with women working and success in leadership positions. They also tend to give priority to men in terms of employment and promotion even if there are many women who have the same qualifications (McElwee, & Al- Riyami, 2003).
However, another challenge is that a poor employment market is anticipated to continue in Oman, because “the annual number of college and university graduatesalready exceeds the annual number of jobs available in Oman” (Al-Barwani et al., 2009,p. 416). Fewer jobs available inside the country causes graduates to seek work elsewhere, but the opportunity for emigration is less likely for women than for men because of cultural restrictions on women travelling or living away from the family (Al-Harthi,2011).

That is, travel for work purposes is limited, as there may be little support for women working due to seeming role conflicts between employment and family obligations (Hutchings et al., 2010;Metcalfe, 2006). There is gap between highly educated women and their presence in employment which concludes that such women continue to seek employment(Elnaggar,

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