This book offers new insights on young women's situation in the Middle East and Northern Africa. Adopting a life course perspective Gebel and Heyne develop a general micro-macro theoretical framework for understanding the chances and barriers young women face in their most crucial life period, namely the transition to adulthood. Drawing on large-scale individual-level longitudinal data from Egypt, Iran, Jordan, and Syria, the authors describe the incidence, timing, and characteristics of central transitions in the education system, the transition from education to work and family formation. They find that there is no standard pathway to adulthood, yet rather a great variety of individual early life courses inducing a high level of social inequality among young women. The book identifies a set of individual-level, familial, and contextual factors that hinder or pave young women's way in the different life domains and shows strong interrelationships between early life course conditions and transitions.