Reduced Prospects for Young Saudis

Last week, The New York Times reported that young people in Saudi Arabia are having a tough time finding jobs. The Saudi government has long been a major employer of its citizens but now is forced to spend less lavishly as the price of oil declines. I had a foretaste of this situation 15 years ago, when I was doing research in the Kingdom.

In 1999, I was engaged by King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals to develop a computer-based system for career assessment and information. Eight years before, Saudi Arabia had financed the first Gulf War to the tune of $50 billion. But the Kingdom was not recouping its investment, because the price of oil had been on a generally downward slope ever since the end of that war, and in the previous year the inflation-adjusted price had reached an all-time low. Students at the technology-oriented college paid no tuition and were actually receiving stipends. Therefore, the government was eager to find a way to get students to declare a major that they could complete reasonably fast rather than change majors several times and delay graduation.

I drew on my experience as one of the developers of the SIGI PLUS system at Educational Testing Service in writing my proposal for the system.  Like SIGI PLUS, the Career Oasis system would use work-related values as one of the ways students could identify potentially suitable occupations. But it seemed likely that the SIGI PLUS set of work-related values, which had worked well with American and Australian students, might not be a good fit in the Kingdom. So, as part of the development plans, I included on-site research into the values of Saudi students.

With a committee of faculty and staff, I worked out a set of values to test, based mostly on the content model of O*NET, the career information database developed for the U.S. Department of Labor. For these values, the O*NET database provided ratings for hundreds of occupations. But we decided to add a value that might be important to people growing up in the conservative Islamic culture of the Kingdom. After some discussion we defined the value as “not being in situations that break with norms, customs, or traditions,” and eventually we settled on the name “Conventionality.”

I had a very lively discussion with the committee about whether, in the Saudi context, the value “Conventionality” occupied a conceptual space different from the O*NET-derived “Moral Values.” The latter was defined by O*NET as “not being pressured to do things that go against your sense of right and wrong.” Contributing to the controversy was the fact that the only Arabic words we could settle on to translate “right” and “wrong” were the religious terms “halal” and “haram.” In the end, we decided to let my research clarify whether students perceived a difference, and in fact they did give different levels of support to these two values. On questionnaires that asked the students to weight the importance of the values, they gave Moral Values considerably higher weightings than Conventionality.

What is particularly interesting, however, in light of last week’s Times article, is what the students’ highest-weighted values said about their career ambitions. I surveyed two types of students: those in the orientation year at the (all-male) university, and the children of faculty and staff in the (all-male) high school within the university compound. Here are the top 10 values of the high school students:

Rank	Value	Mean Weight	Standard Deviation
1	Social Status	4.8	1.0
2	Achievement	4.7	1.0
3	Advancement	4.6	0.9
4	High Income	4.6	0.8
5	Moral Values	4.5	1.2
6	Security	4.5	1.0
7	Co-workers	4.2	1.2
8	Creativity	4.1	1.3
9	Social Service	4.1	1.5
10	Conventionality	4.1	1.6

And here are the top 10 of the orientation-year college students:

Rank	Value	Mean Weight	Standard Deviation
1	Moral Values	4.6	0.9
2	Achievement	4.6	0.8
3	Social Status	4.6	0.9
4	Security	4.5	0.9
5	Creativity	4.4	0.9
6	Advancement	4.4	1.1
7	High Income	4.3	1.0
8	On-the-job Training	4.0	1.0
8	Working Conditions	4.0	1.4
10	Conventionality	3.9	1.3

What I concluded from these responses was that—apart from the fairly high ranking of Creativity for both groups—the job that seemed to best fit their preferences was the well-paid, not-very-demanding job of a government functionary. “All they want is a diploma and a job in government,” comments a political science professor at King Saud University quoted in Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines--and Future, by Karen Elliott House (Vintage, 2012).

At the time, I had doubts about how well the students’ values could be satisfied by the opportunities available to them. Now, 15 years after I completed my research, one of the main points of the Times article is that although “70 percent of working Saudis are employed by the government,” this kind of job is now much less available to young people than it has been in the past. “With oil revenues crashing and the numbers of young people reaching the work force growing by the day, those jobs have become harder to get as the government cuts costs and pushes Saudis toward the private sector, where job security and salaries are lower on average.”

This economic trend raises troubling questions about the future stability of the Kingdom. Seventy percent of the population is under age 30, and 250,000 reach working age each year. Some workplace conventions are changing–it is now easier for women to enter the work force—but at the same time, it is questionable whether young people have developed a better work ethic than the older generation. As a result, some private-sector employers have resisted the government’s pressure to hire Saudis rather than guest workers.

The social contract that underpins the Kingdom is that the rule of the royal family will not be questioned so long as they enforce a very conservative strain of Islam and keep the citizenry economically secure. The Islamic State now holds out an example of a different model for an Islamic society, and the Kingdom now is draining its deep reserves of cash to prop up the economy. If the values of young Saudis increasingly go unfulfilled, what will become of this key American ally?

A Tribute to Martin R. Katz

As I was growing up, I often thought of making a career in writing, but it never occurred to me to write about careers. This career path, which has been so rewarding to me, I owe to Marty Katz. He died March 17, age 98.

In 1979, he hired me to develop career information for the SIGI program at Educational Testing Service. The System of Interactive Guidance and Information was his brainchild and was one of the pioneering systems in the early days of computer-based career development. His ideas were so far ahead of his time that, initially, the available computers were incapable of storing the amount of information necessary to make the system work. He proposed using a carousel of slides to display the fixed information (such as occupational descriptions) so that the computer’s limited storage would be freed up for the interactive textual elements. He also conceived a radical layout for the display, making it a mosaic of text blocks rather than a solid page of text.

But SIGI was more than a technological breakthrough. It also was the implementation of his unique values-based approach to career development. Instead of basing career choice on a single domain, such as interests or skills, or encouraging birds of a feather to flock together, he posited that people choose careers in order to obtain rewards that they value. These rewards could be extrinsic, such as high income or prestige, or intrinsic, such as helping others or the opportunity to work in a field in which one has a strong interest. He did considerable research to identify which values are most widely held and most readily understood. In fact, by recording user interactions, he was able to employ SIGI itself as a research tool to gather statistics on values preferences. Besides confirming his selection of values for the system, it enabled him to study values differences between the sexes.

His values-based philosophy of career development represented a break with the theories that were the legacy of the Second World War, a time when national mobilization was more important than individual self-actualization. He also emphasized self-assessment, as opposed to testing—ironically, his employer’s main line of business. His approach was perfectly in tune with the 1960s decade of self-exploration and the 1970s “me decade.”

I did not know or understand any of these ideas when he hired me. Until then, my education had been in English literature and my work experience had been mostly in teaching English composition. I had learned a tiny bit about career development from trying to get my own career started, and especially from reading (and doing all the exercises in) What Color Is Your Parachute? From one of these exercises (a self-assessment), I discovered that I derived the greatest satisfaction and feelings of competence from research and writing. So when Marty advertised a job opening for someone to research and write career information, I applied and submitted a writing sample. He liked my writing and, when I said I hadn’t yet given up on a career as an English professor, he asked me whether I would give the SIGI job three years before moving on. I agreed. Thirty-five years have passed, and in a way I have not moved on yet.

Marty recognized potential in me and served as a valuable mentor. Although for the first two years my work for SIGI was focused almost entirely on researching salaries—using primary sources, such as the salary surveys of professional organizations, and following well-established procedures—in the following year Marty entrusted a new research project to me: developing descriptions of college majors. In its field test, SIGI had asked each college to provide descriptions of the majors they offered. This was a powerful way to help career decision makers with their planning, but the institution-specific information proved to be too costly for subsequent institutional subscribers to develop and maintain. SIGI needed generic descriptions of college majors, a kind of information that—compared to occupational information—was (and still is) very scarce. Marty assigned me a two-year research and development project that not only created a new module for SIGI but also laid the groundwork for the R&D strategies I have used in more recent years for several books—such as my next book for Meyer & Meyer Publishing, Choose Your College Major in a Day. Marty also entrusted me to key in the large amount of text that I was developing. A new text-entry program allowed relatively unskilled workers like me to enter and edit text, if only one line at a time.

In the obituary that ran in The Times of Trenton, you can read a lot more about his achievements, including the 1992 Eminent Career Award from the National Career Development Association. He probably would have achieved greater recognition in his field if he had done more self-promotion, but he seldom spoke at conferences because he was very hard of hearing as long as I have known him. And when he retired, he walked away from all involvement in the field.

He once remarked that he had taught college-level statistics although he had never taken a course in statistics. He said, “Most of what I’ve done has been without special training. I live by my wits.” This statement, with its tone of self-deprecation masking well-earned pride, strikes me as very characteristic of his personality.

Values of Men and Women, Part 2

Last week I blogged about differences between the career-related values of men and women. I used data from the 2003 National Survey of College Graduates, which was conducted by the Census Bureau on behalf of the National Science Foundation. Respondents were asked about the importance of various factors (which may as well be called values) that they consider when they think about a job.

Last week I looked at which values male and female respondents most often identified as very important. This week, I’m looking at what the different college major choices of men and women indicate about their value differences.

Of course, the values that the survey covers are not necessarily the only considerations that men and women bear in mind when they make the choice of a major. Some of these values, such as salary and job location, are expressed in job-related terms and therefore can influence the choice of a major only insofar as students consider the relationship between their prospective major and their future job. On the other hand, the job-major relationship is a very significant (often paramount) influence on many students’ major decisions, so it’s understandable that men’s and women’s feelings about careers would be related to their preferences for certain majors. Furthermore, some of these values, especially intellectual challenge, apply equally well to a major as to a job. Therefore, it seems likely that any male-female differences choosing between these values will be reflected in their choices of majors.

I thought it would be useful to look at the correlation between (a) the percentage of graduates of a major who say a value is very important and (b) the percentage of male and female graduates of a major. In other words, I’m asking which values tend to be rated highest by graduates of the majors with the most female graduates and lowest by graduates of the majors wit the least female graduates (and the same question for men). This is another way of getting at the question of which values characterize each sex. It may even be more meaningful than the results I looked at last week, which were based solely on professed preferences. This time, I’m also looking at behaviors--the college majors that were chosen and completed.

Here are the results for women, in descending order. Keep in mind that a score of 1.0 would mean a perfect correlation.

• Contribution to Society: 0.60
• Benefits: 0.17
• Location: 0.12
• Security: 0.11
• Responsibility: 0.05
• Challenge: –0.01
• Independence: –0.20
• Advancement: –0.53
• Salary: –0.59

Now, compare this to the very different order I found last week, looking only at expressed opinions:

• Benefits: 64%
• Security: 62%
• Challenge: 59%
• Independence: 59%
• Location: 59%
• Salary: 54%
• Contribution to Society: 53%
• Responsibility: 43%
• Advancement: 37%

Next, here are the correlations for men. These are actually the same as for the women but in the opposite order. That is, the minus signs change to plus signs and vice versa.

• Salary: 0.59
• Advancement: 0.53
• Independence: 0.20
• Challenge: 0.01
• Responsibility: –0.05
• Security: –0.11
• Location: –0.12
• Benefits: –0.17
• Contribution to Society: –0.60

Finally here are last week’s very different results for men, in descending order:

• Benefits: 65%
• Security: 61%
• Independence: 59%
• Salary: 58%
• Challenge: 55%
• Location: 48%
• Advancement: 45%
• Responsibility: 44%
• Contribution to Society: 38%

What strikes me is that when the two sexes are compared, the rankings I compiled last week (the percentages saying a value is very important) are a lot more similar than the rankings I compiled this week (the correlations). Specifically, the values associated with the majors that the men and women chose (and completed) adhere much more closely to the stereotypes of women as nurturers and men as strivers.

What explains these different findings? Last week, I created only two pools of graduates, one male and one female. Taking the averages of the two pools, as I did last week, washed out a lot of the differences that were present among subpopulations within each pool. But I was able to tease out some of these hidden differences by breaking up these large pools into smaller sets based on their past behaviors--the majors that they chose and completed. In addition, using correlations allowed me to detect the values profiles of those graduates who had gravitated toward majors that were dominated by one sex or the other. These grads may have been a minority--their opinions are hard to detect when you look at overall averages--but they show that the sex-stereotypical values profiles remain a reality for a significant group of people.

The larger lesson to take away is that the simple percentages one sees in many survey results (for example, what percentage of voters is currently backing a certain candidate) can disguise some information that would valuable to know about subpopulations in the sample.

Work-Related Values of Men and Women

One topic that never gets stale is the difference between the career-related values of men and women. The group that I worked in at Educational Testing Service had done some research on that topic in the 1970s, before I arrived, and a graduate student intern did some further research while I was there in the 1990s. Each time this was studied, the general finding was that, on average, men tend to be strivers and women tend to be nurturers.

I recently became acquainted with a dataset that has the potential of providing another look at this question. Ever since late July I have been working on creating the third edition of  College Majors Handbook with Real Career Paths and Payoffs. I turned in the manuscript this week. The book is based on the 2003 National Survey of College Graduates, which was conducted by the Census Bureau on behalf of the National Science Foundation.

One set of questions on the survey form asks respondents, “When thinking about a job, how important is each of the following factors to you….” The values (factors) are the following:

• Salary
• Benefits
• Job Security
• Job Location
• Opportunities for Advancement
• Intellectual Challenge
• Level of Responsibility
• Degree of Independence
• Contribution to Society

Respondents are asked to score each value as very important, somewhat important, somewhat unimportant, or not important at all.

I thought it would be interesting to see how men and women scored these values differently, so I looked at what percentage of each sex scored each value very important.

Here are the results for women, in descending order:

• Benefits--64%
• Security--62%
• Challenge--59%
• Independence--59%
• Location--59%
• Salary--54%
• Contribution to Society--53%
• Responsibility--43%
• Advancement--37%

And the results for men, in descending order:

• Benefits--65%
• Security--61%
• Independence--59%
• Salary--58%
• Challenge--55%
• Location--48%
• Advancement--45%
• Responsibility--44%
• Contribution to Society--38%

You won’t notice a great amount of difference between the two sexes, but a few things stand out. The biggest difference is their attitude toward Contribution to Society; 15 percent more women than men rated this as very important. Another large difference applies to Job Location; 10 percent more women than men rated this as very important. The priorities of the sexes are notably reversed regarding Opportunities for Advancement, which 7 percent more men than women rated as very important.

You can find slight differences in their attitudes toward Salary and Intellectual Challenge. The former was very important to more men than women by a margin of 4 percent, and the latter more important to women than men by the same margin.

All other differences were trivial--1 percent or less.

These results largely confirm the traditional images (confirmed by the ETS research) of men as strivers and women as nurturers, although the difference of opinion on Salary is not as great as I expected from the ETS research. It may be that women in 2003 perceived themselves as playing a more vital role as wage-earners than they did at the time the ETS research was conducted in the 1970s and 1990s.

The difference in the ratings for Job Location may have a connection to the nurturing role; women may place more importance on working near home so they can more easily respond to family emergencies. However, that’s just speculation on my part. Location may be a stand-in for some other need, popular among women, that I don’t recognize.

Let me stress that these are averages and don’t describe every man or woman. In fact, the ETS research found that in each sex, there was a subset of respondents whose constellation of top values closely matched the one that was characteristic of the opposite sex.

If this general topic interests you, you may want to see what I learned from my research on the work-related values of male students in Saudi Arabia in 2002.