Gender stereotypes and higher education in Armenia

Abstract

While most educated women in Armenia advocate gender equality and equal rights for higher education, the reality proves there is still gender discrimination embedded into our mentality and cultural norms. The survey results presented in the previous section serve as a proof. Analyzing the answers of 150 participants without higher education, we came to the conclusion that equal opportunities for higher education are available for both genders, but there are some factors which obstacle women in their pursuit of higher education. As it turned out, those factors to hinder their pursuit were husbands’/fathers’ prohibition and then financial problems. Another factor was early marriages, one that almost all women regret about. Thus, in our reality, women are mostly deprived of higher education because men do not allow them to. This comes from a common misperception that sons only are the breadwinners and the ones to take care of their parents, meanwhile daughters leave their home to look after their in-laws. In other words, our society reflects patrilocal norms as endogeneity. What’s more, even under the circumstances of equal opportunities for education, most men view themselves as the ones to decide what their wives or daughters are allowed to do. In their deep conviction, a woman should not be allowed to study as she has to prioritize marriage and marital life which is strongly incompatible with a student’s life. Women, on the other hand, confess they would be proud of their husbands if they had higher education. They would like to be highly educated themselves, if granted a chance. So, women prove to be totally indiscriminative when it comes to having a husband with a higher status than themselves. In an attempt to embrace all these answers under one umbrella, we can witness that our hypothesis is partially accepted, which states that the existing gender stereotypes create a measurable shortage of highly educated women in Armenia. According to the data found in the framework of this research in the mentioned 4 marzes there is a shortage of highly educated women because of stereotypical views, however, that is not the only reason for the shortage of highly educated women in Armenia. As we found out from the previous sections, women suffer because of financial problems and early marriages as well. Therefore, not all the blame should be adhered to husbands’ or Fathers’ discriminative outlooks. Even though the gender inequality is widely accepted as embedded into our cultural norms, but we still hope that a growing number of educated youngsters will tend to appreciate equal rights for both genders.