Beyond the ‘techno-harem’: On the absence of gendered intellectual stereotype threat in the Arab world—evidence from Egypt

The majority of university students enrolled in science programmes in the Arab world are women. Recent studies have attributed this rare occurrence of gender equality in science to factors such as Islamic conservatism, cultural authoritarianism and familial pressure to enter high-earning fields where women can work from home—a discourse I term the ‘techno-harem’. This mixed-methods study draws on results from a survey of 968 Arab female members of a computer science network, as well as in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 20 female computer scientists from Egypt. The interviewed scientists have lived between the Arab world and Euro-America, and, reflecting on their comparative experiences, described an ‘intellectual stereotype threat’ that women in Euro-America face, but which does not exist in the Arab world. In the conclusion of this article, I hypothesize, based on historical comparative sociological analysis, that such gendered conceptions of the mind in relation to technology have racial origins. The article proposes that racialized notions of evolution, eugenics and phrenology contributed to the establishment of a clear hierarchy of intellectual capacity, which was central to the colonial project, in the nineteenth century. Caught in this web, white women—who were viewed as having ‘smaller brains’ relative to white men—became understood as inferior at abstract intellectual tasks, such as mathematics and science. Brown women across formerly colonized countries did not suffer the same cultural downgrade. The article presents an empirical example of constitutive intersectionality, in which race, gender and technology mutually constitute one another, and in which these intersections co-create axes of both oppression and liberation within specific cultures of science.