Fulbright study: women and the economy in Sri Lanka

Six months after graduating from Whitman College, Jessica Diebert Vechbanyon-gratana finds herself conducting research in a faraway land. Recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship, she is in Sri Lanka studying the economic problems facing young women in that island nation.

Her research focuses on an under-lying political-economic structure that has created large numbers of well-educated people, many of them women, who have few opportunities for employment equal to their skills. She is interviewing women of many backgrounds ranging from university graduates to rural residents. To what extent are her Sri Lankan counterparts disillusioned and discouraged by their limited career and professional opportunities? "That's what I'm here to find out," Diebert Vechbanyongratana said.

Two years after this photo was taken, Jessica Diebert Vechbanyongratana, '00, is back in Sri Lanka, this time as a Fulbright Scholar. Others in the photo are John Scripps, '00, far left, I. G. Sumanasena, and Daniel Kent, '97, who also studied in Sri Lanka as a Fulbright Scholar.

Her work includes examining, in detail, Sri Lanka's economic development process over the past 50 years by reviewing relevant publications. Two large collections of such materials are available at the International Centre for Ethnic Studies in Kandy and the National Archives in Colombo. She also is tracing the history of gender issues in the country's development efforts. Her goal is to gain an understanding of the "big picture within which issues of women's employment in Sri Lanka are formed."

Sri Lanka's educational system sets a regional standard in that its government pays for studies through the university level. Nonetheless, as she adds, "Education still tends to be uneven between males and females. Men tend to be trained for the professions while women tend to follow courses that are not supported by the current economy."

While exploitation of women has been a common theme in her previous research, over the course of the year, Diebert Vechbanyongra- tana hopes to focus primarily on the contributions women have made to the Sri Lankan economy.

Diebert Vechbanyongratana, who is from Boulder, Colorado, visited Sri Lanka twice as part of her undergraduate studies.

Soon after enrolling at Whitman, she declared her Asian studies major and polished off courses ranging from Japanese language and literature to the history of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam. She spent the fall of her junior year in Sri Lanka, completing a foreign-study semester at Peradeniya University and conducting an independent study project on women in that country's hand-loom industry. She then returned to Sri Lanka the next summer, funded by one of Whitman's Perry Research Scholarships, to examine government policies aimed at generating foreign earnings through the "export" of Sri Lankan housemaids to the Middle East. Her research eventually led to her honors thesis, titled "Women and Sri Lanka's Structural Adjustment Policies."

After she learned of her Fulbright selection in late June, she and Panya "John" Vechbanyongratana were married in Boulder. The couple traveled to Thailand in September to visit his family in Bangkok for a month. From there, she headed to Sri Lanka to begin her research while her husband returned to Boulder, where he works as an information systems manager.

Diebert Vechbanyongratana hopes to present her Fulbright research in one or more academic settings. Her long-range plans include additional post-graduate studies of women's employment issues in the developing world. She is fluent in the Sinhalese, Japanese, and Thai languages.