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Arab Youth Look Forward in Anger
(Economist-UK) Amazingly, in some Arab countries, the more time you spend in school, the less chance you have of finding a job. In Egypt, 34% of university graduates were unemployed in 2014, compared with 2% of those with less than a primary education. The inequality between the sexes also stands out: 68% of women aged 15-24 were jobless in Egypt compared with 33% of men. Yet for all their traditional subordination, women now make up the majority of university graduates in the Arab world. Young Arabs are unhappier than their elders and than their peers in countries at similar stages of development, according to Ishac Diwan of Harvard University. A survey by the Pew Research Center found that only 35% of those polled in the Middle East thought their children would be better off financially than them, compared with 51% in Africa and 58% in Asia. Diwan notes that, on the whole, young Arabs are markedly more patriarchal and less tolerant towards people of different cultures or religions than young people in other middle-income countries.