Oman has long been globally known for promoting women’s education and has now come in for praise for bringing about a social change in the engineering sector, where more than half of Omani engineers are female.
According to a report by UNESCO (United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization), Oman and Malaysia have the largest proportion of female engineers, comprising 53% and 50% of their total engineering workforce.
The Sultanate received a global appreciation for its remarkable number of women engineers.
Oman’s government has made comprehensive efforts to allow Omani girls to study at some of the world’s most prestigious universities. Therefore, it isn’t surprising that over half of Omani engineers are women who decided to take up their profession in this male-dominated sector.
Razan al Lawati, an Omani pipeline engineer working on a program to improve the output of graduates in Petrofac, provider of oilfield services to the international oil and gas industry, said that more than 40% of the engineers participating in her company’s postgraduate program are women.
But the global statistics are not very encouraging. A majority of the developed nations are still striving to achieve a higher ratio of women engineers among their population.
According to UNESCO, the number of female graduates in engineering, physics, maths and computer science in Europe and North America is generally small. Meanwhile, women only make up 19% of engineers in Canada, Germany and the USA and 22% in Finland.
Nevertheless, there are some bright spots, as 50% of engineering graduates are women in Cyprus, 36% in the Russian Federation and 38% in Denmark.
UNESCO highlighted that a considerable proportion of female engineers hail from the developing countries of the world.
“At least three out of ten engineers are women, for instance, in Costa Rica and Vietnam, besides those in the United Arab Emirates (31%), Algeria (32%), Mozambique (34%), Tunisia (41%) and Brunei Darussalam (42%). In Malaysia and Oman, the figure is an astonishing 50% and 53% respectively,” UNESCO said in a statement.
