Saudi Arabian Universities Push to Recruit Women Faculty

In the kingdom’s mostly gender segregated education system, expanding department offerings to female students means needing to hire women professors—a scarcity in STEM fields in Saudi Arabia.

| 4 min read
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As a high school student in Saudi Arabia, Reem Khojah’s dream was to study software engineering at the King Fahd University for Petroleum and Minerals. “Most of the alumni from KFUPM end up in high-ranking engineering and administrative position jobs, and I want to be successful like them. Unfortunately, at that time, there was no engineering school for women,” says Khojah, now a joint postdoc at the University of California, Santa Cruz and Stanford University.

There are very few engineering programs for women, resulting in a shortage of homegrown women engineers to train the next generation of students in Saudi’s gender-segregated education system, in which students are taught by teachers of the same sex. Despite having a strong passion for engineering, Khojah eventually settled for doing a degree in Medical Applied Science at the King Abdulaziz University.

Traditionally, women in ...

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  • Andy Tay

    Andy received his PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2014, focusing on neuromodulation and engineering. He subsequently completed his postdoctoral training at Stanford University, where he developed nanotechnologies for immuno-engineering. Andy is listed as a 2019 Forbes 30 Under 30 (North America, Science) and is a freelance writer based in Singapore.

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