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