Gendered STEM: A Systematic Review and Applied Analysis of Female Participation in STEM in the United Arab Emirates

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The article raises the important topic about the education and professional realization of Arab women in the stereotyped as ‘male’ STEM disciplines, implicitly incorporating the issues of youth unemployment; gender biases; national strategy towards innovation and knowledge-based economy; and more generally, the role of STEM education for stimulating the economic and societal development of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) aiming to move from petrol-focused economy to economy of knowledge. A lot of interesting and little-known information is revealed, the most astonishing of which is perhaps the fact that in the UAE women outnumber men almost in all different fields of study - with the exception of Shari’a & Islamic Studies, Law, and Computer science and informatics where the enrolled men slightly prevail in numbers over women.

It was also a bright idea to make a comparison between the situation of women from the UAE, who have been studying and seeking professional realization in STEM disciplines, with groups of women with similar professional problems in other countries. The methodology to select such studies has been correctly designed and applied.

However, the most problematic part in the paper is the secondary analysis of the obtained results, which entirely blurs the cultural differences existing between the studied category of Arab women in the UAE and those in India, Southern Africa, Brazil and the USA.  

Therefore, the otherwise interesting text deserves to be further elaborated, in order to outline, on the one hand, more categorically the most impressive conclusions about the non-Western type of modernization in the UAE, where women are encouraged by their parents to receive higher education, including in STEM disciplines, but at the same time their strive to education is related to patriarchal and religious motives. Impressive is also the role of the Emirates in the stimulation of women in education, and the strategy towards knowledge-driven economy.

However, the secondary analysis of the seven selected studies should be radically re-written (Section 4. Interpretation of Results), and the authors should take advantage of the obtained results and demonstrate them in a clear cross-cultural narrative, revealing the various different forms of underrepresentation and gender discrimination of women in technical professions existing in the five mentioned countries.

There are also some smaller (perhaps linguistic) problems and a few more specific questions and recommendations:

1. When mentioning UAE’s national strategy of “Emiratisation”, it needs a brief explanation – what it is about and what the latter term signifies?
2. The authors should state more precisely the aim of their research: “The present research aims to gain a better understanding of women engineers in United Arab Emirates (UAE) (57). Perhaps, the aim is to understand the challenged position of women engineers and the existing gender bias impeding their professional realization. Certainly, the paper is not about the women-engineers as such.
3. The statement “Even fathers motivate their daughters to study engineering ; .” (75) – needs a reference to the existed studies, otherwise it sounds like a profane talk. Note that the punctuation is quoted as it exists in the text. This is just a sample of many other cases of careless punctuation in this article which need to be corrected and typos to be edited.
4. Similarly, the expression “needs and realities of Emirati women engineers seeking for employment in this field?” (85-86) should be stated more precisely. It is not certain of what kind of needs the authors are thinking – professional, psychological, institutional support. The notion “realities” is also too vague. The authors perhaps mean “The reality gap between the professional aspirations and the factual realization of Emirati women engineers seeking for employment”. In the same vein, a more precise title would certainly improve the first impression from the suggested text.
5. "Expatriates" used e.g. in Table 7- are they immigrants (foreign women in the Arab Emirates) or ex-emigrants (Arab women who have been living abroad and later returned home)?
6. In the methodology of selection of international studies, ‘region limiters’ are mentioned (150) – please, specify what were these ‘limiters’?
7. Unproper referencing has been used within the text – by quoting the numbers of the cited study/work instead of the names of the researchers what additionally increases the perplexity of the offered analysis. For example, “In the recent study by [40] women are abandoning engineering professions - the name of the researchers (289) etc.
8. In Tables 10, 12, 13, 14 – please, specify how many unstructured in-depth interviews have been taken (if such information is available). 
9. It is well to know how the themes are determined and listed in orderly manner in the examined 7 papers? This explanation is needed to avoid possible subjectivity. 
10. In Table 12, the section "Main findings", please, read and edit the following sentence which currently sounds pointless: "Thus, there are still traditional gender roles in which females were assigned communication and relationship components while males were assigned communication and relational components."
11. Table 15 is unnecessary, it is enough to enlist the bias assessment checklist, and to explain that all selected studies entirely comply with these requirements.
12. The authors state that “While women dominate engineering and other STEM disciplines at the university level in the UAE, the contributions came from women who had abandoned their careers [40]”. (263-264 ) It is unclear - what kind of "contributions" are meant - in terms of professional realization, career advancement or what? Please, specify!
13. The authors often use the notion of patriarchy, e.g. it was not referenced in any of the other included studies [42]; [43]; [44]; [45]; [46] (244). As patriarchy is a complex notion with authoritative and even political sence, the authors should make perhaps a distinction between “patriarchal” and “paternal” influence/impact in the process of decision-making about future profession and career path. 

In spite of the numerous recommendations/comments/questions, the presented article promises to give an invaluable information about the challenges of the educated in technical subjects Arab women in their path to professional realization, and more generally – about the non-Western model of modernization that takes place in the UAE.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

I congratulate with authors for this paper: It is very interesting and suitable for any reader in STEM field.

 Comments:

1. Evaluate the possibility of improving the abstract including the main results of paper.
2. The introduction is too long. You should consider how can be shortened. The most information must to be summarized.
3. Line 117: there is a mistake “UAUE”, the correct form is “UAEU”
4. Assess the possibility of including an outline about the research methodology carried out.
5. Lines 23, 26, 27, 28, 31, 33, 37, 42, 45, 47. There are wrong spaces.
6. Which is the reason or criteria to considered study only eight papers?
7. The paper nature is qualitative, because the methods are too. Evaluate the possibility of introducing a quantitative study or almost quantitative results, to evaluate.
8. Table 15 is unnecessary, all the papers studied include the critical analysis checklist. Evaluate the possibility of improve this analysis.
9. Improve the discussion, one option could be a comparative study of the results obtained.
10. The conclusions are generals. Improve this point. Include the highlights of the results obtained on the interviews and the data collection.
11. Check references: they do not adapt to the MDPI format and there are line spacing errors.
12. Check references: they do not adapt to the MDPI format. In the text, the correct format to two references is [52, 53], not [52]; [53].
13. Evaluate include more references:

Patterson, L., Varadarajan, D.S. and Saji Salim, B. (2020), "Women in STEM/SET: gender gap research review of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) – a meta-analysis", Gender in Management, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/GM-11-2019-0201

Dickson M., Fidalgo P., and Cairns D. (2019) The ‘S’ and ‘T’ in STEM: Integrating Science and Technology in Education in the UAE. In: Gallagher K. (eds) Education in the United Arab Emirates. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7736-5_6

Makhmasi, S., Zaki, R. Barada, H. and Al-Hammadi, Y. "Factors influencing STEM teachers' effectiveness in the UAE", Proc. 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conf., 2012. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/6462396

14. Important: explain the most important different between your paper and Patterson et al, 2020. Certain similarities can be observed at a glance.

Author Response

please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

I find your editted text much improved and recommend it for publication. 

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors improved the manuscript by responding to the reviewers' concerns adequately.