Jordan has made significant progress in extending universal access to education. The
youth literacy gender gap has closed and the ratio of women to men in primary,
secondary, and tertiary education are 0.96, 1.1, and 1.1, respectively. Women are getting
married later (singulate mean age at first marriage reached 25.8 years in 2011 compared
to 24.7 years in 1994) and have fewer children (Total Fertility Rate decreased from 5.6 to
3.8 births per woman between 1990 and 2009). However, in Jordan the support provided
to increasing women's access to health and education appears to have helped women to
fulfill their maternal and reproductive roles more than to encourage them to enter the
formal labor market. The women’s labor force participation in 2011 was 15 percent,
while it did not exceed 10 percent for young women. It is worthy to note that the rate is
64 percent for men and 39 percent for young men. This means that women’s potential is
not fully utilized. Furthermore, women’s unemployment rate is almost two times higher
than unemployment rate for men; women unemployment rate for year 2011 was 21
percent compared to 11 percent for men. As a result, the policy challenge for Jordan is to
foster job creation for its young population while increasing the economic participation of
women. The value added of this paper is that it addresses both labor demand and supply
issues related to young female participation in the labor force which responds to the need
of improving young women’s skills and their access to employment opportunities in
order to achieve successful transformation of human and natural resources into
sustainable and inclusive economic growth. The terms used to describe this “value
added” are too broad; they need to be more clearly spelled out.