In the United States, women constituted 35% of the STEM workforce in 2021, while representing approximately 49.7% of science and engineering bachelor’s degree holders in 2019. The gaps observed between countries result from multiple factors, beyond cultural considerations alone. Economic diversification policies have integrated measures for scientific training and job access. A rigorous regional comparison requires harmonized definitions and sources, as well as common indicators on female STEM graduates and their professional integration.
The Essential Points
- The Middle East produces proportionally more female STEM graduates than the United States or Europe, a result of deliberate convergence between state policies and university strategies.
- Women represent more than 57% of STEM graduates in the region, compared to 34% in the United States, according to Forbes NewsMag and the Technology Innovation Institute (June 2026).
- Vision 2030 programs in Saudi Arabia and Nafis in the UAE have structured this convergence: sectoral quotas, targeted financing, partnerships with major universities.
- Effective access to STEM careers remains to be measured: educational mobility can encounter a ceiling in the labor market.
- By 2035, the challenge will be to determine whether this public investment produces an autonomous knowledge economy or sustained dependence on state-directed orientation.
The Policy That Preceded Academic Success
Saudi Arabia launched Vision 2030 in 2016 with an explicit objective: reducing dependence on hydrocarbons by building a knowledge economy. Women were positioned as a strategic lever, not as collateral beneficiaries. Nafis is primarily a program for Emiratization and support for private employment of Emirati citizens, both men and women. These policies distinguish themselves from classical liberal approaches, which act on incentives and representations without touching the structure of educational supply.
What happened next resembles what economist Mariana Mazzucato describes in The Common Good Economy: a state that does not merely correct market failures but deliberately co-creates an ecosystem of value with universities and businesses, oriented toward a politically defined objective of the common good. In the case of the Gulf, that objective was post-petroleum diversification. STEM training was inscribed within strategies of economic diversification. National and university policies may have contributed to certain results, but available sources do not permit causally attributing a regional gap to deliberate convergence between the state and universities. According to a UNESCO estimate cited by the OECD, women represented approximately 34% to 57% of STEM graduates depending on the Arab countries studied.
It is tempting to seek a cultural explanation for this figure. Some observers invoke a tradition of female education in Gulf countries, or sex-segregated schooling that has, paradoxically, produced learning environments without male competition. These factors exist. No harmonized before-and-after series demonstrates that these factors had not already produced high levels in certain countries. Available data do not permit isolating the respective effect of institutions and cultural factors.
The Policies the United States Did Not Implement
During the same period, the United States multiplied initiatives to feminize STEM: federal programs, private foundations, awareness campaigns, university-business partnerships. According to the NSF, women rose from 32% of the American STEM workforce in 2010 to 34% in 2019, then 35% in 2021.
A classical liberal reading, one that Tyler Cowen or Luigi Zingales would defend, attributes part of the gap to individual preferences in career orientation, which is not without foundation. Professional trajectories in American STEM vary according to disciplines and employment conditions. Labor market conditions and educational supply must be analyzed separately.
The more convincing explanation is structural. American policies have included educational and institutional interventions; their effectiveness and scope may be debated, but they are not limited to representations. American policies have addressed the orientation of women toward STEM and certain conditions of study and employment, with effects that vary according to mechanisms. Direct state interventions exist in training and employment, but the description of a uniform regional policy explicitly feminized is excessive.
This is the difference between a state that creates conditions and a state that co-creates an ecosystem. The first lets the market decide the rest. The second structures the market around an objective. The tension between these two logics runs through the debate on industry and training in all major economies. One finds a version of it in the way private capital orients itself toward real estate rather than toward innovation: when the market alone arbitrates, it optimizes for what is already profitable, not for what would be useful.
Capture as a Structural Risk
The quantified success of Gulf policies does not settle the question of the destination of these graduates. The proportion of female STEM graduates does not, by itself, measure their access to technical positions. Women have made educational progress and are present in sectors such as education and health, but their access to technological, technical, and managerial employment remains unequal and insufficiently documented across countries.
This question returns to a risk that Mazzucato herself identifies in her work: that of the capture of gains from public investment by private interests or government elites. A state that finances training massively can find itself producing human capital whose benefits are distributed unequally between businesses and public institutions. If women with STEM degrees in the Middle East encounter institutional obstacles, the economic returns from their academic success may remain limited.
The signals are contradictory. The United Arab Emirates has produced visible career trajectories for women in leading technical positions, notably in the space sector. Nora AlMatrooshi, the first Emirati and Arab woman astronaut, was selected in 2021. Nora AlMatrooshi is an emblematic and heavily publicized figure in the UAE space program. In Saudi Arabia, the dynamic is more recent and results more uneven.
The place of women in private sector engineering functions varies according to available data and sectors considered.
Vision 2030 opened possibilities; its effect on professional hierarchies remains to be evaluated.
Lessons from the Gulf Model for Europe
For European policymakers, the lesson is uncomfortable. Europe believes it lacks STEM talent. In the EU, women represented 32.8% of tertiary STEM graduates in 2021; available comparisons do not permit attributing a gap with the Gulf to targeted investments.
Housing sorts students before school and other structural constraints limit educational mobility in European countries before the question of gender even arises. In STEM, gaps in participation depend on educational, professional, and institutional factors. Supply-side policy matters. Targeted financing matters. Coordination between universities, businesses, and national objectives matters.
The liberal objection deserves to be taken seriously: the state can co-create an ecosystem, but it can also orient training toward outlets that will not exist, produce graduates without a market, and freeze an employment structure around obsolete political priorities. The Gulf remains confronted with the risk that diversification does not create sufficient productive private jobs for nationals. This risk is documented: Gulf oil producers began reorienting their economies well before energy transition forced them to, but the consolidation of a private industrial fabric remains an economic diversification objective.
The Real Variable at Stake Before 2035
Available international data show significant but heterogeneous results across countries; an assertion based on 2026 data for the entire Gulf requires an explicitly cited regional basis. The challenge of the coming decade is whether this public investment generates an autonomous knowledge economy or creates sustained dependence on state-directed orientation, whose cessation would destabilize the entire system.
Two trajectories are possible. In the first, female STEM graduates from the 2010-2020 decade occupy technical management positions in viable private businesses by 2035, export their skills, create start-ups, and the human capital constituted becomes self-sustaining. Universities in the region attract foreign students, research partnerships balance out, and the state can progressively lift regulatory constraints without the system disintegrating. In this trajectory, the Gulf model becomes a transferable lesson: proof that human capital mobility is an institutional choice, not a cultural inevitability.
In the second trajectory, the private labor market does not follow. Women with STEM degrees find themselves concentrated in the public sector, which employs them by political obligation rather than real economic need. Private engineering salaries remain structurally low because the state subsidizes demand, discouraging autonomous private investment. The model produces statistics, but not competitiveness. An innovation gap is insufficient to conclude that training produced only qualification; one must separately analyze R&D capacities, financing, and the entrepreneurial fabric.
The signals that will allow distinguishing between these two trajectories before 2030 are observable now: the evolution of the private employment rate of female STEM graduates relative to the public sector, the progression of private R&D spending as a percentage of GDP, and the capacity of Gulf universities to retain their best research faculty without public salary alignment. These indicators are more revealing than the graduate rate itself.
The question of the democratic legitimacy of this entrepreneurial state also deserves to be posed. Mazzucato identifies it as the central challenge of her model: a state that co-creates value must also account for the choices it makes in the name of the common good. Accountability mechanisms vary according to countries and policies concerned. Decision-making and public consultation modalities differ according to policies concerned. This does not invalidate the results, but it means that their transferability to liberal democracies is partial: coordination mechanisms are importable, but the speed and verticality of decision-making are not.
Lessons Democracies Can Draw from the Model Without Adopting It Entirely
The lesson does not argue that Europe or the United States should imitate top-down authoritarian policies. It argues that democracies should stop treating the lack of women in STEM as a problem of individual preferences to be corrected through communication, and begin treating it as a structural problem to be corrected through institutional architecture.
This involves genuinely coordinating university financing with labor market needs, rather than letting both evolve in parallel. It involves conditioning public aid to the technology industry on measurable commitments regarding qualified female employment, rather than being satisfied with voluntary charters. And it involves accepting that the state can co-create value without planning the economy: the difference lies in the quality of institutions that arbitrate between political objectives and market reality.
In 2026, the practical question for democracies is identifying which institutions are capable of coordinating such policy without sacrificing accountability or exposing themselves to capture. Coordination policies between training, employment, and public investment produce variable results across countries and sectors. The viability of these policies when the state reduces its direct intervention must be evaluated using long-term data.
Sources
- Forbes NewsMag, “How the Middle East Became a Global Leader in Female Tech Talent” (June 2026): https://www.forbesnewsmag.com/2026/06/30/how-the-middle-east-became-a-global-leader-in-female-tech-talent/
- Technology Innovation Institute, Analysis on Female STEM Participation in the Middle East (March 2026), URL not verified
- Mariana Mazzucato, The Common Good Economy: A New Compass: https://marianamazzucato.com/books/the-common-good-economy/
