The Working Women of Egypt - Part 2

Here's part 2 of the post that I wrote for my Global Business Forum class about the Middle East:

http://faculty.washington.edu/categ/megbf/?p=67

Here's a copy of the post:
The last post was about why women aren't contributing enough to the work force, and where they are they do it temporarily, out of a dire need, or as a means to an end. But i haven't broached the subject of discrimination against women in the work place yet. This is part 2 of that post...

There are many ways in which a working woman in Egypt is at a disadvantage, and I’m sure that if I tried to list all of them, I could go on for hours. I’ll just pick one that Rita Zawaideh mentioned about discrimination against women in the work place. Rita told us about a friend of hers that decided to open a software development company in Libya (I think?), and as part of that he started hiring people but quickly found that he could not hire women since they couldn’t stay late, due to cultural restrictions, so he just hired men. Having been on the receiving end of that discrimination myself, I find it very difficult to sympathize with Rita’s friend. The reason for this is two-fold:

The first part of it is that being someone who works in the software industry, and who actually founded and managed a startup in Egypt, there is no good reason that I can think of that actually requires women to work late nights in the software industry, other than what you might call ‘corporate greed’, but I’d just call it opportunism. Truth is, companies in Egypt are just abusing their employees, without paying overtime, because unemployment is so rampant that employers feel like they’re doing you a favor by hiring you, so they’ll slave-drive you as much as they want to, and there is basically no such thing as enforcement of employee rights (actually, I’m not sure the laws even exist), so good luck with that! Coming from a relatively liberal family, and being ambitious and career-focused, I didn’t have that same restriction with regards to work hours as most other women my age did, only partially because I fought against it with all my might. But I did not expect my employees to abide by my same unconventional hours, which I molded to fit my needs. In fact, I encouraged them not to. Sometimes there would be work crunches, and we would work 12+ hour days, but there was always a way for them to get home at an acceptable hour. And when work needed to be done at strange hours, seeing as it’s the 21st century and we’re computer geeks, we found a technological solution for that, so it’s not like it’s really “impossible”.

The second part of it is that I find the behavior of discriminating against women that way blatantly disrespectful, invasive and unfair, but let me put that into context. I went to an interview once, for a large ISP in Cairo. After asking me some technical and general interview questions, all of which I answered quite well, the interviewer proceeded to quiz me about… being a woman, basically. He asked me whether I was in a relationship. I said I wasn’t. He asked whether I was going to be in one soon. ‘Well err.. I don’t know, I guess, but I’m not thinking about that right now’. He asked whether I would stop working if I got married. I said I wouldn’t. At this point I was starting to feel “whoa.. this is way unprofessional”. But he was just getting started. He then proceeded to ask me what I would do if I got pregnant and had children. Would I stop working? How much time would I want off? When do I think I will do that? When do I think I’ll get married? Can I work late? Or will I tell them “Sorry mommy and daddy said I have to go home”. He *actually* asked it that way, in a sarcastic tone. Needless to say, I was shocked. I felt like somebody just waltzed right into my private space, and gave themselves more right to interrogate me than I gave my own mother (and in Egyptian culture, the concept of privacy between mother and daughter is nonexistent, so creating a boundary on its own is a challenge). I cannot stress enough how demeaning this experience was. I would have much rather have been grilled for 8 hours as I was for my job at Microsoft, on technical and competency related challenges, even if I might have failed, than be exposed to this experience. Now that I think back to that day, I wish I had been more assertive and not put up with this. My experience is not uncommon, I’ve heard of similar horrors.

The Working Women of Egypt

Here's a post I wrote for my Global Business Forum class about the Middle East:
http://faculty.washington.edu/categ/megbf/?p=63

Here's a copy of the post:

“(In Egypt) Over half of the governmental work force is now female! The women are taking all the jobs yet they still complain about inequality? What inequality! We (men) should be the ones complaining”, complained a cab driver to me, as if he were citing a terrible injustice to men in Egypt. I didn’t really want to get into it with him, because judging by my previous experiences along similar lines, I’d be barking up the wrong tree. I don’t actually know if there is any truth to the statistics he posed as fact, but I do know that the governmental jobs he speaks of are some of the most menial, lowest paying, undesirable jobs available in the Egyptian economy, so even if he were right, that does not mean much with regards to equality. If he were making the same statement 35 years ago, it might have meant something, because back then government jobs were held in the highest esteem, and paid well. But now, the average pay for a government job at a lower ladder position (which are the positions that the women are more likely to occupy) is less than $50/month. It really isn’t enough to live on, and a large portion of that is just spent on transportation cost to/from work. The cheapest mode of transportation will cost you about $0.5 per day, assuming you never take a taxi. Now if you’re a woman who’s lived in a place like Egypt and experienced the incessant amounts of sexual harassment in public, you’d know that this is a very unrealistic expectation. Some of the women I know of who make about $50/month claim that they spend more than half of that on transportation, because they avoid walking whenever possible by grabbing a cab. These conditions don’t make it very desirable for a woman to pursue a job, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

The bigger factor is that jobs are seen as ‘optional’ for women, and careers are quite undesirable. You see, women in Muslim societies are not expected to provide for themselves or their families – that is the man’s job. So any work the woman does and gets paid for is purely optional, and she gets to keep all the money for herself. Rita Zawaideh touched upon this in her talk, but while she cited it as a way in which Islam gave women more rights than they had before (which is true), I see its wide-spread application as a curse on the efficient functioning of society since half of your potential work force are encouraged not to work, and that yields a dependency which only serves to hurt women in the long run. Let’s think of it this way: if you’re a traditional man in Egypt, why would you want your wife to work, if a- she’ll make close to nothing (as discussed above), and b- you have no real expectation that she will use that money to help with household expenses as your equal, so you’re better off with her basically being the housekeeper instead. So a lot of women end up being forced to stay at home; and I use the word forced in a very broad sense here, because I recognize “society’s norms” as a force. Many women work until they find a husband, then quit, either because that was their plan all along, or because that’s the husband’s expectation (and you’d be surprised at the amount of pressure that a man can employ due to the societal structure), or because of unforgiving work circumstances for a working mother in Egypt.

According to Shama Kabani, in this post: http://www.forbes.com/sites/yec/2011/07/13/walk-like-an-egyptian-in-heels/ , only 16% of entrepreneurs in Egypt are women, and when she approached some strong entrepreneurial women to ask about this, the response was pretty much in line with what I just described: women are expected to run households, marriage is perceived as the most important thing, and once you get married you are provided for, so spouse wouldn’t understand why you would want to start a company, because society doesn’t expect much of a woman outside taking care of the household.

I don’t know if any of this will change in the near future, but I suspect it will not. If you look back over the years, it seems that Egypt has regressed with regards to women’s rights. That might just be a false impression of mine from hearing about ‘the good old days’ when women could wear whatever they want to and not be judged or harassed for it, but with the increasing influence of Islamists over the, literally, ~50% illiterate population, I would not be surprised if things get a lot worse before they get better. Despite this negative outlook I just gave you, I have hope. Because looking at the younger generations, I see more ‘fight’ in them than the older ones, so people may try to oppress them for as long as they can, but eventually light will burn bright, and the Egyptian women will realize their true potential, and rise up to the challenge. More young women seem to be taking their career seriously, and recognizing the oppression rather than denying it as has been the norm, so there is still hope. Maybe not in my lifetime, but I hope that one day future generations will witness a free, equal and just Egypt.

Bin Laden is finally dead... About time!

It's extremely frustrating to read comments from people on social media or news sites, especially when they are people you know, that are outrageous enough to claim that Osama Bin Laden did this world an ounce of good overall, was a 'freedom fighter', or anything else worth praising. I mean, really? You should be ashamed of yourselves. Perhaps if they had been your kids killed, or your loved ones, you would not have been so blind-sighted by your hate for the mythical American monster. Or perhaps if you just gave it a little more thought...

In Arabic we say "la shamata fi almawt" (there's no gloating in death), which means that you should never be glad and gloating that someone died.. but this is one unique situation in which I think it's quite fair to be at least relieved that he's gone. You can argue that capturing him would've been better, and I won't object to that, but given that it wasn't an option, I say good riddance. It's not so much gloating that he's dead, but rather a recognition that if dead or alive are the only two options, the former is more useful. He had terrorized this world for way too long, and better him dead than more innocent people as he continues his reign of destruction on the world.

Now you can also argue that the US 'created' him by training him and giving him weapons...etc, but I actually believe in free will. Unless you are clinically insane, you are in control of your actions, so if you can't legitimately make the claim that he was mentally ill (and not in the "omg that guy was so freakin crazy!" way), then please spare me the BS of 'the US created him'. Who cares? At the end of the day he was a cold blooded murderer of thousands. Do you also pardon and praise all the murderers out there because they were 'created' by society due to being abused when they were kids, shunned by people, or born with an aggressive gene?

Then there's the argument that pisses me off the MOST... you know, the one about how the US has killed a lot more innocent people than he did? Even if you could prove that to be true, erm... excuse me, but I don't think it's a "curve". For example, just because Hitler killed millions, doesn't mean another murderer at that same time should've gotten a free pass to kill thousands, does it? Oh yea, justice doesn't quite work that way. You kill people, you get what's coming to you, whether that's 5, 5000, or 5 million. Similarly, just because the US did one thing right, now, doesn't mean they get a free pass either, and nobody is asking you to let go of your anti-war convictions.

If you have a brain, and you chose to use it to kill innocent civilians and children, then twist God's words to suit your cause and brainwash kids to enlist them to eventually kill themselves for your twisted goals, you are nothing less than the worst monster imaginable, and NOTHING anybody can say about his reasons can possibly change that.

That man probably single-handedly did more disservice to Islam than the rest of us combined. He's imposed his taint on our faith, and we all have to struggle daily to clean up the mess he created. Practicing or not, living in the west or not, you've been affected by him just for being a Muslim.

So yes: I'm glad he's dead. Today, the world is a better place and I am grateful for it. Sure, someone will replace him, and I am not naive enough to believe this changes the course of his group, but as far as I am concerned, justice has been served, as much as it can be in this world, and I pray that he rots in hell forever to pay for the rest of it.

Finally, the US army has done something I approve of :-)