Publication Date
Fall 2025
Abstract
This paper examines the educational agency of young women in rural Tunisia, particularly in Djerba, exploring the paradox between high educational attainment and limited economic empowerment. Despite consistently outperforming male peers academically, university-educated Tunisian women face significantly higher unemployment rates and entrenched gender roles that dictate their mobility. The central question is the extent to which young women in rural Tunisia possess the agency required to realize their educational goals and how they balance traditional expectations with personal aspirations. Using a qualitative methodology, questionnaires were distributed in Arabic to a small sample of three university students in Djerba. Centering the authentic voices of these women, the analysis seeks to deconstruct Western-centric narratives of empowerment by authentically understanding how agency is expressed within local traditional and economic contexts. This study argues for empowerment initiatives focused on rural women's self-identified needs, and its findings offer a divergence from broader literature
Disciplines
Social and Behavioral Sciences
Recommended Citation
Righi, Ruth, "Educational Mobility and Agency for Young Women in Rural Tunisia" (2025). Tunisia and Italy: Politics and Religious Integration in the Mediterranean. 6.
https://digitalcollections.sit.edu/tnc3/6