WAM Abu Dhabi, 18th May 2009 (WAM) -- The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) has taken the premises of the UAE General Women's Union (GWU) as venue of its child protection programme.
The move falls under the cooperation agreement signed between the GWU and UNICEF.
Meanwhile, Noura Al Suweidi, GWU Director, received today Dr Ayman Abu Laban, UNICEF representative to the Gulf region, and Lara Hussein the UNICEF's Child Protection Officer in the UAE.
Al Suweidi said the GWU was ready to offer all possible assistance to enable the programme carry out strategy towards welfare of children being executed by the GWU with local stakeholders with assistance of the UNICEF.
Showing posts with label Gulf States. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gulf States. Show all posts
Monday, May 18, 2009
Monday, December 22, 2008
Gulf States: In Booming Gulf, Some Arab Women Find Freedom in the Skies
ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — Marwa Abdel Aziz Fathi giggled self-consciously as she looked down at the new wing-shaped brooch on the left breast pocket of her crisp gray uniform, then around the room at the dozens of other Etihad flight attendants all chatting and eating canapés around her.
It was graduation day at Etihad Training Academy, where the national airline of the United Arab Emirates holds a seven-week training course for new flight attendants. Downstairs are the cavernous classrooms where Ms. Fathi and other trainees rehearsed meal service plans in life-size mockups of planes and trained in the swimming pool, where they learned how to evacuate passengers in the event of an emergency landing over water.
Despite her obvious pride, Ms. Fathi, a 22-year-old from Egypt, was amazed to find herself here.
“I never in my life thought I’d work abroad,” said Ms. Fathi, who was a university student in Cairo when she began noticing newspaper advertisements recruiting young Egyptians to work at airlines based in the Persian Gulf. “My family thought I was crazy. But then some families don’t let you leave at all.”
A decade ago, unmarried Arab women like Ms. Fathi, working outside their home countries, were rare. But just as young men from poor Arab nations flocked to the oil-rich Persian Gulf states for jobs, more young women are doing so, sociologists say, though no official statistics are kept on how many.
Flight attendants have become the public face of the new mobility for some young Arab women, just as they were the face of new freedoms for women in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s. They have become a subject of social anxiety and fascination in much the same way.
The dormitory here where the Etihad flight attendants live after training looks much like the city’s many 1970s-style office blocks, its windows iridescent like gasoline on a puddle. But there are three security guards on the ground floor, a logbook for sign-ins and strict rules. Anyone who tries to sneak a man back to one of the simply furnished two-bedroom suites that the women share may be dismissed, even deported.
In the midst of an Islamic revival across the Arab world that is largely being led by young people, gulf states like Abu Dhabi — which offer freedoms and opportunities nearly unimaginable elsewhere in the Middle East — have become an unlikely place of refuge for some young Arab women. And many say that the experience of living independently and working hard for high salaries has forever changed their ambitions and their beliefs about themselves, though it can also lead to a painful sense of alienation from their home countries and their families.
At almost any hour of the day or night, there are a dozen or more young women with identical rolling suitcases waiting in the lobby of their dormitory to be picked up for work on Etihad flights. Though several are still drowsily applying makeup — and the more steady-handed have perfected a back-of-the-bus toilette that takes exactly the length of their usual ride to Abu Dhabi International Airport — they are uniformly well ironed and blow-dried. Those with longer hair wear black hair-ties wrapped around meticulously hair-netted ponytails. They wear jaunty little caps with attached gauzy scarves that hint at hijab, the head coverings worn by many Muslim women. Like college students during exams, all of them gripe good-naturedly about how little they have slept.
There are exclamations of congratulation and commiseration as the women learn friends’ assignments. Most coveted are long-haul routes to places like Toronto and Sydney, Australia, where layovers may last many days, hotels are comfortable and per diem allowances from the airline to cover food and incidentals are generous. Short-haul flights to places like Khartoum, Sudan, are dreaded: more than four hours of work, followed by refueling, a new load of passengers, an exhausting late-night return flight to Abu Dhabi and the shuttle bus back to the dormitory tower with its vigilant guards.
Upstairs, scrubbed of their thick, professional makeup, most of the women look a decade younger. They seem to subsist on snack food: toast made, Arabic-style, by waving flaps of pita over an open flame; slivers of cheap, oversalted Bulgarian cheese; the Lebanese date-filled cookies called ajweh; pillowy rolls from a local Cinnabon outlet that one young Syrian flight attendant proclaimed herself addicted to (an expression she used with self-conscious delight, a badge of newfound worldliness).
They watch bootlegged DVDs — “Desperate Housewives,” “Sex and the City” — bought on layovers in Bangladesh and Indonesia. They drift along the tiled floors between their rooms in velour sweatpants and fuzzy slippers, and they keep their voices low: someone is always trying to catch a wink of sleep before her flight.
A Lonely Existence
It is a hushed, lonely and fluorescent-lighted existence, and it is leavened mostly by nights out dancing. Despite the increasing numbers of women moving to the gulf countries, the labor migration patterns of the last 20 years have left the Emirates with a male-female ratio that is more skewed than anywhere else in the world; in the 15-to-64 age group, there are more than 2.7 men for every woman.
Etihad flight attendants are such popular additions to Abu Dhabi’s modest hotel bar scene that their presence is encouraged by frequent “Ladies’ Nights” and cabin-crew-only drink discounts. It is almost impossible for an unveiled woman in her 20s to go to a mall or grocery store in Abu Dhabi without being asked regularly, by grinning strangers, if she is a stewardess.
One evening last fall, an Egyptian flight attendant for Etihad with dyed blond hair and five-inch platform heels led a friend — a 23-year-old Tunisian woman wearing a sparkly white belt who said that she had come to the Emirates hoping to find work as a seamstress — up to the entrance of the Sax nightclub at the Royal Meridien Hotel.
Just inside, in the bar area, several young Emirates men in white dishdashas were dancing jerkily to deafening club music.
Clutching her friend by the elbow, the Egyptian woman indicated one of the bouncers. “Isn’t he just so yummy?” she shrieked. The bouncer, who had plainly heard, ignored her, and the women filed past. Despite appearances, explained the Egyptian flight attendant — who asked not to be named because she was not authorized by Etihad to speak to the news media — sex and dating are very fraught matters for most of the young Arab women who come to work in the Emirates.
Some young women cope with their new lives away from home by becoming almost nunlike, keeping to themselves and remaining very observant Muslims, she said, while others quickly find themselves in the arms of unsuitable men. “With the Arabic girls who come to work here, you get two types,” the Egyptian woman said. “They’re either very closed up and scared and they don’t do anything, or else they’re not really thinking about flying — they’re just here to get their freedom. They’re really naughty and crazy.”
Treated Like a Heroine
Rania Abou Youssef, 26, a flight attendant for the Dubai-based airline, Emirates, said that when she went home to Alexandria, Egypt, her female cousins treated her like a heroine. “I’ve been doing this for four years,” she said, “and still they’re always asking, ‘Where did you go and what was it like and where are the photographs?’ ”
Many of the young Arab women working in the Persian Gulf take delight in their status as pioneers, role models for their friends and younger female relatives. Young women brought up in a culture that highly values community, they have learned to see themselves as individuals.
For many families, allowing a daughter to work, much less to travel overseas unaccompanied, may call her virtue into question and threaten her marriage prospects. Yet this culture is changing, said Musa Shteiwi, a sociologist at Jordan University in Amman. “We’re noticing more and more single women going to the gulf these days,” he said. “It’s still not exactly common, but over the last four or five years it’s become quite an observable phenomenon.”
Unemployment levels across the Arab world remain high. As the networks of Arab expatriates in the gulf countries become stronger and as cellphones and expanding Internet access make overseas communication more affordable, some families have grown more comfortable with the idea of allowing daughters to work here. Some gulf-based employers now say they tailor recruitment procedures for young women with Arab family values in mind. They may hire groups of women from a particular town or region, for example, so the women can support one another once in the gulf. “A lot of girls do this now because this has a reputation for being very safe,” said Enas Hassan, an Iraqi flight attendant for Emirates. “The families have a sense of security. They know that if their girls start flying they won’t be thrown into the wide world without protection.”
A Feeling of Displacement
Yet not everyone can make peace with life in the United Arab Emirates, the young flight attendants say. Even the landscape — block after sterile block of hotels and office buildings with small shops and takeout restaurants on their lower floors — can contribute to a feeling of displacement. Nearly all year long, for most of the day, the sunlight is bright white, so harsh that it obliterates all contrast. Despite vigilant watering, even the palm trees on roadsides look grayish and embattled.
Some of the young women tell stories of fellow flight attendants who have simply slipped onto planes to their home countries and run away, without giving notice to the airline.
The most successful Arab flight attendants, they say, are often those whose circumstances have already placed them somehow at the margins of their home societies: young immigrant women who are supporting their families after the death of a male breadwinner, for example, and a handful of young widows and divorced women who are eventually permitted to work overseas after their prospects of remarriage have dimmed.
Far more than other jobs they might find in the gulf, flying makes it difficult for Muslim women to fulfill religious duties like praying five times a day and fasting during Ramadan, the Egyptian attendant noted. She said she hoped to wear the hijab one day, “just not yet.” A sense of disconnection from their religion can add to feelings of alienation from conservative Muslim communities back home. Young women whose work in the gulf supports an extended family often find, to their surprise and chagrin, that work has made them unsuitable for life within that family.
“A very good Syrian friend of mine decided to resign from the airline and go back home,” the Egyptian flight attendant said. “But she can’t tolerate living in a family house anymore. Her parents love her brother and put him first, and she’s never allowed out alone, even if it’s just to go and have a coffee.”
“It becomes very difficult to go home again,” she said.
-- Katherine Zoepf, New York Times
It was graduation day at Etihad Training Academy, where the national airline of the United Arab Emirates holds a seven-week training course for new flight attendants. Downstairs are the cavernous classrooms where Ms. Fathi and other trainees rehearsed meal service plans in life-size mockups of planes and trained in the swimming pool, where they learned how to evacuate passengers in the event of an emergency landing over water.
Despite her obvious pride, Ms. Fathi, a 22-year-old from Egypt, was amazed to find herself here.
“I never in my life thought I’d work abroad,” said Ms. Fathi, who was a university student in Cairo when she began noticing newspaper advertisements recruiting young Egyptians to work at airlines based in the Persian Gulf. “My family thought I was crazy. But then some families don’t let you leave at all.”
A decade ago, unmarried Arab women like Ms. Fathi, working outside their home countries, were rare. But just as young men from poor Arab nations flocked to the oil-rich Persian Gulf states for jobs, more young women are doing so, sociologists say, though no official statistics are kept on how many.
Flight attendants have become the public face of the new mobility for some young Arab women, just as they were the face of new freedoms for women in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s. They have become a subject of social anxiety and fascination in much the same way.
The dormitory here where the Etihad flight attendants live after training looks much like the city’s many 1970s-style office blocks, its windows iridescent like gasoline on a puddle. But there are three security guards on the ground floor, a logbook for sign-ins and strict rules. Anyone who tries to sneak a man back to one of the simply furnished two-bedroom suites that the women share may be dismissed, even deported.
In the midst of an Islamic revival across the Arab world that is largely being led by young people, gulf states like Abu Dhabi — which offer freedoms and opportunities nearly unimaginable elsewhere in the Middle East — have become an unlikely place of refuge for some young Arab women. And many say that the experience of living independently and working hard for high salaries has forever changed their ambitions and their beliefs about themselves, though it can also lead to a painful sense of alienation from their home countries and their families.
At almost any hour of the day or night, there are a dozen or more young women with identical rolling suitcases waiting in the lobby of their dormitory to be picked up for work on Etihad flights. Though several are still drowsily applying makeup — and the more steady-handed have perfected a back-of-the-bus toilette that takes exactly the length of their usual ride to Abu Dhabi International Airport — they are uniformly well ironed and blow-dried. Those with longer hair wear black hair-ties wrapped around meticulously hair-netted ponytails. They wear jaunty little caps with attached gauzy scarves that hint at hijab, the head coverings worn by many Muslim women. Like college students during exams, all of them gripe good-naturedly about how little they have slept.
There are exclamations of congratulation and commiseration as the women learn friends’ assignments. Most coveted are long-haul routes to places like Toronto and Sydney, Australia, where layovers may last many days, hotels are comfortable and per diem allowances from the airline to cover food and incidentals are generous. Short-haul flights to places like Khartoum, Sudan, are dreaded: more than four hours of work, followed by refueling, a new load of passengers, an exhausting late-night return flight to Abu Dhabi and the shuttle bus back to the dormitory tower with its vigilant guards.
Upstairs, scrubbed of their thick, professional makeup, most of the women look a decade younger. They seem to subsist on snack food: toast made, Arabic-style, by waving flaps of pita over an open flame; slivers of cheap, oversalted Bulgarian cheese; the Lebanese date-filled cookies called ajweh; pillowy rolls from a local Cinnabon outlet that one young Syrian flight attendant proclaimed herself addicted to (an expression she used with self-conscious delight, a badge of newfound worldliness).
They watch bootlegged DVDs — “Desperate Housewives,” “Sex and the City” — bought on layovers in Bangladesh and Indonesia. They drift along the tiled floors between their rooms in velour sweatpants and fuzzy slippers, and they keep their voices low: someone is always trying to catch a wink of sleep before her flight.
A Lonely Existence
It is a hushed, lonely and fluorescent-lighted existence, and it is leavened mostly by nights out dancing. Despite the increasing numbers of women moving to the gulf countries, the labor migration patterns of the last 20 years have left the Emirates with a male-female ratio that is more skewed than anywhere else in the world; in the 15-to-64 age group, there are more than 2.7 men for every woman.
Etihad flight attendants are such popular additions to Abu Dhabi’s modest hotel bar scene that their presence is encouraged by frequent “Ladies’ Nights” and cabin-crew-only drink discounts. It is almost impossible for an unveiled woman in her 20s to go to a mall or grocery store in Abu Dhabi without being asked regularly, by grinning strangers, if she is a stewardess.
One evening last fall, an Egyptian flight attendant for Etihad with dyed blond hair and five-inch platform heels led a friend — a 23-year-old Tunisian woman wearing a sparkly white belt who said that she had come to the Emirates hoping to find work as a seamstress — up to the entrance of the Sax nightclub at the Royal Meridien Hotel.
Just inside, in the bar area, several young Emirates men in white dishdashas were dancing jerkily to deafening club music.
Clutching her friend by the elbow, the Egyptian woman indicated one of the bouncers. “Isn’t he just so yummy?” she shrieked. The bouncer, who had plainly heard, ignored her, and the women filed past. Despite appearances, explained the Egyptian flight attendant — who asked not to be named because she was not authorized by Etihad to speak to the news media — sex and dating are very fraught matters for most of the young Arab women who come to work in the Emirates.
Some young women cope with their new lives away from home by becoming almost nunlike, keeping to themselves and remaining very observant Muslims, she said, while others quickly find themselves in the arms of unsuitable men. “With the Arabic girls who come to work here, you get two types,” the Egyptian woman said. “They’re either very closed up and scared and they don’t do anything, or else they’re not really thinking about flying — they’re just here to get their freedom. They’re really naughty and crazy.”
Treated Like a Heroine
Rania Abou Youssef, 26, a flight attendant for the Dubai-based airline, Emirates, said that when she went home to Alexandria, Egypt, her female cousins treated her like a heroine. “I’ve been doing this for four years,” she said, “and still they’re always asking, ‘Where did you go and what was it like and where are the photographs?’ ”
Many of the young Arab women working in the Persian Gulf take delight in their status as pioneers, role models for their friends and younger female relatives. Young women brought up in a culture that highly values community, they have learned to see themselves as individuals.
For many families, allowing a daughter to work, much less to travel overseas unaccompanied, may call her virtue into question and threaten her marriage prospects. Yet this culture is changing, said Musa Shteiwi, a sociologist at Jordan University in Amman. “We’re noticing more and more single women going to the gulf these days,” he said. “It’s still not exactly common, but over the last four or five years it’s become quite an observable phenomenon.”
Unemployment levels across the Arab world remain high. As the networks of Arab expatriates in the gulf countries become stronger and as cellphones and expanding Internet access make overseas communication more affordable, some families have grown more comfortable with the idea of allowing daughters to work here. Some gulf-based employers now say they tailor recruitment procedures for young women with Arab family values in mind. They may hire groups of women from a particular town or region, for example, so the women can support one another once in the gulf. “A lot of girls do this now because this has a reputation for being very safe,” said Enas Hassan, an Iraqi flight attendant for Emirates. “The families have a sense of security. They know that if their girls start flying they won’t be thrown into the wide world without protection.”
A Feeling of Displacement
Yet not everyone can make peace with life in the United Arab Emirates, the young flight attendants say. Even the landscape — block after sterile block of hotels and office buildings with small shops and takeout restaurants on their lower floors — can contribute to a feeling of displacement. Nearly all year long, for most of the day, the sunlight is bright white, so harsh that it obliterates all contrast. Despite vigilant watering, even the palm trees on roadsides look grayish and embattled.
Some of the young women tell stories of fellow flight attendants who have simply slipped onto planes to their home countries and run away, without giving notice to the airline.
The most successful Arab flight attendants, they say, are often those whose circumstances have already placed them somehow at the margins of their home societies: young immigrant women who are supporting their families after the death of a male breadwinner, for example, and a handful of young widows and divorced women who are eventually permitted to work overseas after their prospects of remarriage have dimmed.
Far more than other jobs they might find in the gulf, flying makes it difficult for Muslim women to fulfill religious duties like praying five times a day and fasting during Ramadan, the Egyptian attendant noted. She said she hoped to wear the hijab one day, “just not yet.” A sense of disconnection from their religion can add to feelings of alienation from conservative Muslim communities back home. Young women whose work in the gulf supports an extended family often find, to their surprise and chagrin, that work has made them unsuitable for life within that family.
“A very good Syrian friend of mine decided to resign from the airline and go back home,” the Egyptian flight attendant said. “But she can’t tolerate living in a family house anymore. Her parents love her brother and put him first, and she’s never allowed out alone, even if it’s just to go and have a coffee.”
“It becomes very difficult to go home again,” she said.
-- Katherine Zoepf, New York Times
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Gulf States: Greater role for Gulf first ladies
DOHA: The first lady of this conservative Muslim sheikhdom walked up to the podium in a luxury hotel banquet room and sized up the crowd of mostly wealthy businessmen. "Do not be afraid to take risks and to try," she told them. "Think out of the box." Sheika Mozah bint Nasser Al-Missned may have been wearing a traditional black headscarf and robe, but she took on a very untraditional role in rallying the men to support a $100 million initiative to tackle unemployment.
Like her counterpart in Dubai, Oxford-educated Princess Haya, Mozah is taking up the Western "first lady" model - activist, globe-trotting and involved in public affairs. It's a major change in a region where a ruler's wife is rarely seen and even her name is little known. She might be one of several; many emirs and kings in the Gulf have multiple wives - up to the four permitted by Islam, though sometimes the actual number is not well known. In some cases, the ruler will pick one to be the public "first lady".
The emergence of high-ranking wives on the public stage is part of the booming Gulf states' efforts to appear more in synch with the West as they seek investment, political clout and even big-name sporting events like the Olympics. It's also clearly a competition with other high-profile Middle East women, such as Jordan's Queen Rania. In recent years, Qatar - like the other small Arab countries lining the Arabian Gulf - has transformed its desert landscape into a financial and media hub.
High-rises and construction cranes now swarm the once-barren skyline of Doha, home to Al-Jazeera, the groundbreaking Arabic-language satellite TV station. Mozah, who is believed to be in her 40s, has taken a starring role in the transformation. She is one of Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani's wives - it is not publicly known how many he has - and the only one who makes public appearances. Her most prominent role is as chairwoman of the Qatar Foundation, which launched Education City, a 1,012-hectare campus outside Doha and home to branches of prominent American universities like Carnegie Mellon and Georgetown.
Mozah is increasingly rivaling Queen Rania's globe-trotting, giving speeches at institutions in the US and Europe. Last year, she claimed one of the spots on Forbes magazine's list of the world's 100 most powerful women. At home, she wears traditional long robes. In the West she wears stylish business suits. "No Gulf royalty stands out as Mozah does," said Rima Sabban, a Dubai-based sociologist. "She broke all cultural barriers and shaped an image of a woman that is fully modern, fully confident and fearless of a backlash from the society... Mozah's strategy is part of her husband's goal to put Qatar on the world map.
In the even glitzier city of Dubai, Princess Haya is also breaking the rules - giving speeches on public welfare, working on public projects, appearing in magazines, keeping up personal websites and traveling the world. Dubai gained significant political influence in the region through the 2004 marriage of its powerful ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al-Maktoum, with the 34-year-old Haya, daughter of the late King Hussein of Jordan.
They have one daughter, though the Dubai ruler has 18 other children, most with Sheika Hind bin Maktoum Al-Maktoum, the first of his wives to become publicly known. Like Mozah, Haya has taken on public roles, including chairing the Dubai International Humanitarian City, a cluster of Western and Islamic charities.
But Haya pushes the traditional boundaries even further. She is rarely seen wearing a headscarf and is a sports enthusiast, a rarity in the male-dominated region. She represented Jordan in equestrian show jumping in the 2000 Olympic Games in Australia, is president of the International Equestrian Federation and even has a truck-driving license, obtained in Jordan to help transport her horses.
Other wives of Gulf rulers are active in campaigning for women's rights, charity and humanitarian issues, particularly in Bahrain and Kuwait, but they have not sought foreign attention or assumed highly public roles. Qatar and the United Arab Emirates both have women Cabinet ministers, and the Emirates recently appointed its first female judge. The Emirates' minister of foreign trade is a woman, as is the founder of Amwal, a top investment company in Qatar.
Women make up 22.4 percent of the Emirates' work force and 32 percent in Qatar, according to government statistics, though it's difficult to know how many are foreigners. Seventy-seven percent of university students in UAE are women, according to the Ministry of Education and Labor. Three-quarters of students who graduated from Qatar University this year were women. Kuwait recently gave women the right to vote and run for office, and it has several female Cabinet ministers, though no woman has been elected to parliament.
It's a domino effect. Success in one country has spilled over into other countries in the region. When a ruler in one country appoints a woman to a high-level post, others follow. It's a healthy competition because everyone wants to show that they are democratizing," said Rola Dashti, a Kuwaiti economist who has run for parliament. Not every country in the region is eager to change. Saudi Arabia, a bastion of conservatism, still keeps its royal wives under wraps and remains the only country in the Middle East to bar women from voting, except for chamber of commerce elections in two cities in recent years.
No women sit in the kingdom's Cabinet, and women can't drive or travel without permission from a male guardian. A prominent Saudi princess, Lolwah Al-Faisal, made headlines two years ago at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland when she spoke out against the driving ban. Another princess, Adelah, gave a rare interview to an Arab women's magazine in 2006, and on occasion speaks at events.
The views of one 20-year-old Qatari university student in journalism, Fawzia, reflect both the change for women in the Gulf and the restrictions that still hold them back. Fawzia did not want her last name used because she said her family and university would regard it as immodest for a young woman to speak out on such matters. Yet she also said the ruling women are opening doors that were closed to her mother's generation. Mozah "has challenged tradition that wanted women to be restricted to the domestic field," Fawzia said. She added that Mozah has made it possible for women to have "a role in the society while also being a wife and a mother." - AP
Like her counterpart in Dubai, Oxford-educated Princess Haya, Mozah is taking up the Western "first lady" model - activist, globe-trotting and involved in public affairs. It's a major change in a region where a ruler's wife is rarely seen and even her name is little known. She might be one of several; many emirs and kings in the Gulf have multiple wives - up to the four permitted by Islam, though sometimes the actual number is not well known. In some cases, the ruler will pick one to be the public "first lady".
The emergence of high-ranking wives on the public stage is part of the booming Gulf states' efforts to appear more in synch with the West as they seek investment, political clout and even big-name sporting events like the Olympics. It's also clearly a competition with other high-profile Middle East women, such as Jordan's Queen Rania. In recent years, Qatar - like the other small Arab countries lining the Arabian Gulf - has transformed its desert landscape into a financial and media hub.
High-rises and construction cranes now swarm the once-barren skyline of Doha, home to Al-Jazeera, the groundbreaking Arabic-language satellite TV station. Mozah, who is believed to be in her 40s, has taken a starring role in the transformation. She is one of Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani's wives - it is not publicly known how many he has - and the only one who makes public appearances. Her most prominent role is as chairwoman of the Qatar Foundation, which launched Education City, a 1,012-hectare campus outside Doha and home to branches of prominent American universities like Carnegie Mellon and Georgetown.
Mozah is increasingly rivaling Queen Rania's globe-trotting, giving speeches at institutions in the US and Europe. Last year, she claimed one of the spots on Forbes magazine's list of the world's 100 most powerful women. At home, she wears traditional long robes. In the West she wears stylish business suits. "No Gulf royalty stands out as Mozah does," said Rima Sabban, a Dubai-based sociologist. "She broke all cultural barriers and shaped an image of a woman that is fully modern, fully confident and fearless of a backlash from the society... Mozah's strategy is part of her husband's goal to put Qatar on the world map.
In the even glitzier city of Dubai, Princess Haya is also breaking the rules - giving speeches on public welfare, working on public projects, appearing in magazines, keeping up personal websites and traveling the world. Dubai gained significant political influence in the region through the 2004 marriage of its powerful ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al-Maktoum, with the 34-year-old Haya, daughter of the late King Hussein of Jordan.
They have one daughter, though the Dubai ruler has 18 other children, most with Sheika Hind bin Maktoum Al-Maktoum, the first of his wives to become publicly known. Like Mozah, Haya has taken on public roles, including chairing the Dubai International Humanitarian City, a cluster of Western and Islamic charities.
But Haya pushes the traditional boundaries even further. She is rarely seen wearing a headscarf and is a sports enthusiast, a rarity in the male-dominated region. She represented Jordan in equestrian show jumping in the 2000 Olympic Games in Australia, is president of the International Equestrian Federation and even has a truck-driving license, obtained in Jordan to help transport her horses.
Other wives of Gulf rulers are active in campaigning for women's rights, charity and humanitarian issues, particularly in Bahrain and Kuwait, but they have not sought foreign attention or assumed highly public roles. Qatar and the United Arab Emirates both have women Cabinet ministers, and the Emirates recently appointed its first female judge. The Emirates' minister of foreign trade is a woman, as is the founder of Amwal, a top investment company in Qatar.
Women make up 22.4 percent of the Emirates' work force and 32 percent in Qatar, according to government statistics, though it's difficult to know how many are foreigners. Seventy-seven percent of university students in UAE are women, according to the Ministry of Education and Labor. Three-quarters of students who graduated from Qatar University this year were women. Kuwait recently gave women the right to vote and run for office, and it has several female Cabinet ministers, though no woman has been elected to parliament.
It's a domino effect. Success in one country has spilled over into other countries in the region. When a ruler in one country appoints a woman to a high-level post, others follow. It's a healthy competition because everyone wants to show that they are democratizing," said Rola Dashti, a Kuwaiti economist who has run for parliament. Not every country in the region is eager to change. Saudi Arabia, a bastion of conservatism, still keeps its royal wives under wraps and remains the only country in the Middle East to bar women from voting, except for chamber of commerce elections in two cities in recent years.
No women sit in the kingdom's Cabinet, and women can't drive or travel without permission from a male guardian. A prominent Saudi princess, Lolwah Al-Faisal, made headlines two years ago at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland when she spoke out against the driving ban. Another princess, Adelah, gave a rare interview to an Arab women's magazine in 2006, and on occasion speaks at events.
The views of one 20-year-old Qatari university student in journalism, Fawzia, reflect both the change for women in the Gulf and the restrictions that still hold them back. Fawzia did not want her last name used because she said her family and university would regard it as immodest for a young woman to speak out on such matters. Yet she also said the ruling women are opening doors that were closed to her mother's generation. Mozah "has challenged tradition that wanted women to be restricted to the domestic field," Fawzia said. She added that Mozah has made it possible for women to have "a role in the society while also being a wife and a mother." - AP
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Bahrain: Wake-up call to Bahraini women
YOUR country needs you, is the message that went out to women from Bahrain's First Lady yesterday.
Women hold the keys, alongside men, to the country's development, said Her Highness Shaikha Sabeeka bint Ibrahim Al Khalifa, wife of His Majesty King Hamad and chairwoman of the Supreme Council for Women (SWC).
She was speaking at the opening of the two-day Gender Mainstreaming in Development conference, at the Gulf Hotel's Gulf International Convention Centre.
The conference, organised by the SCW under His Majesty's patronage, aims to draw up a national plan to empower Bahraini women.
It has brought together 211 participants from government ministries, parliament, the Shura Council, civil societies, the private sector, media, religious scholars and youth societies.
The conference is being attended by representatives from the Arab Woman's Organisation, Arab Gulf Programme for United Nations Development Organisations, United Nations Development Programme, Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia, United Nations Development Fund for Women, Islamic Development Bank, Al Hariri Organisation from Lebanon, the UAE General Women's Union and the National Council for Women in Egypt.
"Empowering Bahraini women and making them equal to men makes Bahrain a true model in respecting the Sharia-compliant principles and the need to develop by balancing the society," said Shaikha Sabeeka.
She said the conference demonstrated the country's interest in finding ways to bring women into the development process and to achieve comprehensive human development.
"The SCW is meeting its national responsibility in establishing a base for this initiative, by providing all the support to create a building and implementation system," said Shaikha Sabeeka.
"This will allow certain bodies in the country, especially parliament and Shura Council, to work towards meeting women's needs in legislation, systems, programmes and work plans."
She said that the SCW called upon the government and the Economic Development Board to draw up a clear national plan, which will guarantee a successful transformation for Bahrain. "I hope that this conference will lead us to a just co-operation that will begin to preserve and provide rights and stability to women and children, in addition to their continuous role in supporting men," said Shaikha Sabeeka.
Gulf Daily News, By Rasha Al Gahtani
Women hold the keys, alongside men, to the country's development, said Her Highness Shaikha Sabeeka bint Ibrahim Al Khalifa, wife of His Majesty King Hamad and chairwoman of the Supreme Council for Women (SWC).
She was speaking at the opening of the two-day Gender Mainstreaming in Development conference, at the Gulf Hotel's Gulf International Convention Centre.
The conference, organised by the SCW under His Majesty's patronage, aims to draw up a national plan to empower Bahraini women.
It has brought together 211 participants from government ministries, parliament, the Shura Council, civil societies, the private sector, media, religious scholars and youth societies.
The conference is being attended by representatives from the Arab Woman's Organisation, Arab Gulf Programme for United Nations Development Organisations, United Nations Development Programme, Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia, United Nations Development Fund for Women, Islamic Development Bank, Al Hariri Organisation from Lebanon, the UAE General Women's Union and the National Council for Women in Egypt.
"Empowering Bahraini women and making them equal to men makes Bahrain a true model in respecting the Sharia-compliant principles and the need to develop by balancing the society," said Shaikha Sabeeka.
She said the conference demonstrated the country's interest in finding ways to bring women into the development process and to achieve comprehensive human development.
"The SCW is meeting its national responsibility in establishing a base for this initiative, by providing all the support to create a building and implementation system," said Shaikha Sabeeka.
"This will allow certain bodies in the country, especially parliament and Shura Council, to work towards meeting women's needs in legislation, systems, programmes and work plans."
She said that the SCW called upon the government and the Economic Development Board to draw up a clear national plan, which will guarantee a successful transformation for Bahrain. "I hope that this conference will lead us to a just co-operation that will begin to preserve and provide rights and stability to women and children, in addition to their continuous role in supporting men," said Shaikha Sabeeka.
Gulf Daily News, By Rasha Al Gahtani
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Qatar: Women fail to break into the boardroom
SOCIAL and cultural factors have impeded female participation in the boardroom of GCC companies, according to a survey.
In Qatar, the number of women on boards was far below the GCC average, said National Investor — which carried out the survey among 3,493 board members occupying 4,254 board seats across 582 listed companies.
It will take a while for women to make headway in economic participation, said National Investor, a privately owned regional investment and merchant banking group.
“Female board representation is very low in the GCC. This was largely expected before we finalised the results of this research,” said the survey.
Of the total board seats, women held only 63 seats, which is a mere 1.5% of the total.
“The small representation of women on regional boards (1.5%) is unsurprising and looks minuscule compared with 13.60% in America and 22% in Norway,” it said.
In Qatar, the proportion was a mere 0.3% (one female holding a board seat out of a total of 322 seats), it said.
Kuwait and Oman have the largest number of women holding board seats. The figure was 2.7% and 2.3% respectively. In Kuwait women held 30 seats out of a total of 1,101. In Oman the number was 21 out of 905.
In Dubai, females were represented in three out of a total of 259, a proportion of 1.2%, while in Bahrain, they had four of the total 402 seats, constituting 1%.
Social and religious factors do explain some inter-regional differences, National Investor said, adding elsewhere, the fiscal environment may favour male inheritance and consequently discourage the economic involvement of women.
The survey said it was unclear at this stage whether the proportion of women directors would change as markets mature.
“Our belief is that some effort is being made to increase female economic participation, and that any material change in the GCC is likely to take time,” National Investor said.
By Santhosh V Perumal, Gulf Times
In Qatar, the number of women on boards was far below the GCC average, said National Investor — which carried out the survey among 3,493 board members occupying 4,254 board seats across 582 listed companies.
It will take a while for women to make headway in economic participation, said National Investor, a privately owned regional investment and merchant banking group.
“Female board representation is very low in the GCC. This was largely expected before we finalised the results of this research,” said the survey.
Of the total board seats, women held only 63 seats, which is a mere 1.5% of the total.
“The small representation of women on regional boards (1.5%) is unsurprising and looks minuscule compared with 13.60% in America and 22% in Norway,” it said.
In Qatar, the proportion was a mere 0.3% (one female holding a board seat out of a total of 322 seats), it said.
Kuwait and Oman have the largest number of women holding board seats. The figure was 2.7% and 2.3% respectively. In Kuwait women held 30 seats out of a total of 1,101. In Oman the number was 21 out of 905.
In Dubai, females were represented in three out of a total of 259, a proportion of 1.2%, while in Bahrain, they had four of the total 402 seats, constituting 1%.
Social and religious factors do explain some inter-regional differences, National Investor said, adding elsewhere, the fiscal environment may favour male inheritance and consequently discourage the economic involvement of women.
The survey said it was unclear at this stage whether the proportion of women directors would change as markets mature.
“Our belief is that some effort is being made to increase female economic participation, and that any material change in the GCC is likely to take time,” National Investor said.
By Santhosh V Perumal, Gulf Times
Friday, May 2, 2008
Gulf States: GCC activists seek greater women’s role in politics
Three GCC women’s rights activists have said that the ‘male-dominated society’ in the region can slow any progress of women’s participation in political life.
A former health minister of Kuwait, Dr Masoumah al-Mubarak, Bahraini politician Munira Fakhro, and Qatar’s Central Municipal Council member Shiekha al-Jufairi are the activists.
Participating in a discussion organised by the National Council for Culture, Arts and Heritage on Wednesday, they talked about their ‘difficult personal experiences’ before and after being involved in the political process.
Dr Masoumah al-Mubarak, whose nomination caused a controversy in her country, said that although many Arab countries had amended their constitution to empower women, that ‘did little’ to speed up the entry of women to the parliament. “The theory that no women have succeeded in getting elected to the parliaments because of a lack of support from other women is not correct and the impression that politics is the headache of men is widely held in the Arab world,” she said.
Munira Fakhro believed that women in her country are victims of election irregularities, and massive nationalisation of non-Bahrainis.
She said the American administration dropped their plan of democracy and also observation of elections in the Arab world because of the victories of Islamic movements.
Shiekha al-Jufairi said that though she won the 2003 municipal elections because others quit the race, she won in 2007 by overwhelming majority beating a serious challenger in her constituency.
-- Gulf Times
A former health minister of Kuwait, Dr Masoumah al-Mubarak, Bahraini politician Munira Fakhro, and Qatar’s Central Municipal Council member Shiekha al-Jufairi are the activists.
Participating in a discussion organised by the National Council for Culture, Arts and Heritage on Wednesday, they talked about their ‘difficult personal experiences’ before and after being involved in the political process.
Dr Masoumah al-Mubarak, whose nomination caused a controversy in her country, said that although many Arab countries had amended their constitution to empower women, that ‘did little’ to speed up the entry of women to the parliament. “The theory that no women have succeeded in getting elected to the parliaments because of a lack of support from other women is not correct and the impression that politics is the headache of men is widely held in the Arab world,” she said.
Munira Fakhro believed that women in her country are victims of election irregularities, and massive nationalisation of non-Bahrainis.
She said the American administration dropped their plan of democracy and also observation of elections in the Arab world because of the victories of Islamic movements.
Shiekha al-Jufairi said that though she won the 2003 municipal elections because others quit the race, she won in 2007 by overwhelming majority beating a serious challenger in her constituency.
-- Gulf Times
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Gulf States: Women in the Gulf seek to prise open the male-dominated world of banking
THE Prophet Muhammad's first wife, Khadija, is known as “the pure one”. She was also a wealthy businesswoman who supported her husband financially, it is believed, in the earliest days of Islam. Her example is often cited in conservative Gulf states by working women increasingly fed up with having to entrust management of their money to husbands or male relatives.
Laws based on Islam have guaranteed women's right to own property for centuries; many have inherited wealth, and, more recently, earned it. There is no religious law barring women from managing money. Yet religious and tribal customs mean conservative families frown on women mixing with unrelated men, even for the dullest of business purposes. In Saudi Arabia, women were legally required to conduct business through a male agent until 2004.
The bank has an eye on you, even when your husbands don't
That law has finally gone, but its ramifications live on. A married businesswoman recently faced flogging for sipping a coffee with a male colleague in a Starbucks in Riyadh. The constraints are less severe in the smaller Gulf monarchies of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). But many women still avoid face-to-face meetings with unrelated men. That makes the male-dominated world of banking particularly hard to penetrate.
There are ways of getting round the problem. Saudi retail banks have set up segregated branches that only women can enter. “Ladies' banks” are also cropping up in the UAE. Segregation is a controversial issue, but the facilities at least allow women to manage their finances independently of prying fathers, brothers or husbands. Rising divorce rates give added motivation for women to hide away some money, sceptical of the help they will get from mostly male judges.
Increasingly, wealth managers are also realising that women in the Gulf region are sitting on fortunes in cash, land and even jewellery. According to Amanda McCrystal of Bramdiva, a London-based wealth-consultation service for women, a few years ago there was a boom in online share-trading by women in the Gulf, since they could do it from the privacy of home. Many were singed by a regional crash in 2006. Some will not return; many of those who do may seek professional advice.
Sandy Shaw, who heads Middle Eastern operations at Coutts, a private bank based in London, says about a quarter of her clients are female, and are keen to keep control of their affairs, especially to ensure that their estates will pass to their children when they die. Aware of this, a small number of Western female bankers now travel regularly to the Gulf to hold meetings with female clients. Again, one of the attractions is privacy; they can visit a Saudi woman at home without her husband present, which a male banker normally could not do. Women may require different products from men, too. In Saudi Arabia and Qatar, for example, they have more of an appetite for lower-risk, capital-protected investments. But this is likely to change as they become more experienced investors, says Ms Shaw.
In the UAE, Dubai World, a government holding company, has set up Forsa, an investment company run by women for women. Its staff scorn what they call “pink-ribboning”: superficial changes to market products to women, like making a credit card pink. Across the region, more such firms would be helpful. This is not only because women need opportunities to work. The finance industry needs them, too: it is growing so fast that it is struggling to recruit and retain staff.
The message has sunk in in Bahrain, where a third of finance-sector employees are female, and in Kuwait, where, including property, the figure rises to 40%. Some employers there say they find female bankers work harder than men. Yet in Saudi Arabia, official statistics indicate that just 5% of Saudis working in finance and property are female. And across the region, it remains hard for female businesswomen to get loans, especially if they are not from prominent families. Even in Bahrain, where nearly one-third of businesses are registered by women, “sometimes women can only get a business licence in their husband's name, especially if they have less capital,” says Aamina Awan, who is researching female entrepreneurship in the region. Khadija may be a role model, but there is a long way to go before Gulf women can freely emulate her business success.
-- The Economist
Laws based on Islam have guaranteed women's right to own property for centuries; many have inherited wealth, and, more recently, earned it. There is no religious law barring women from managing money. Yet religious and tribal customs mean conservative families frown on women mixing with unrelated men, even for the dullest of business purposes. In Saudi Arabia, women were legally required to conduct business through a male agent until 2004.
The bank has an eye on you, even when your husbands don't
That law has finally gone, but its ramifications live on. A married businesswoman recently faced flogging for sipping a coffee with a male colleague in a Starbucks in Riyadh. The constraints are less severe in the smaller Gulf monarchies of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). But many women still avoid face-to-face meetings with unrelated men. That makes the male-dominated world of banking particularly hard to penetrate.
There are ways of getting round the problem. Saudi retail banks have set up segregated branches that only women can enter. “Ladies' banks” are also cropping up in the UAE. Segregation is a controversial issue, but the facilities at least allow women to manage their finances independently of prying fathers, brothers or husbands. Rising divorce rates give added motivation for women to hide away some money, sceptical of the help they will get from mostly male judges.
Increasingly, wealth managers are also realising that women in the Gulf region are sitting on fortunes in cash, land and even jewellery. According to Amanda McCrystal of Bramdiva, a London-based wealth-consultation service for women, a few years ago there was a boom in online share-trading by women in the Gulf, since they could do it from the privacy of home. Many were singed by a regional crash in 2006. Some will not return; many of those who do may seek professional advice.
Sandy Shaw, who heads Middle Eastern operations at Coutts, a private bank based in London, says about a quarter of her clients are female, and are keen to keep control of their affairs, especially to ensure that their estates will pass to their children when they die. Aware of this, a small number of Western female bankers now travel regularly to the Gulf to hold meetings with female clients. Again, one of the attractions is privacy; they can visit a Saudi woman at home without her husband present, which a male banker normally could not do. Women may require different products from men, too. In Saudi Arabia and Qatar, for example, they have more of an appetite for lower-risk, capital-protected investments. But this is likely to change as they become more experienced investors, says Ms Shaw.
In the UAE, Dubai World, a government holding company, has set up Forsa, an investment company run by women for women. Its staff scorn what they call “pink-ribboning”: superficial changes to market products to women, like making a credit card pink. Across the region, more such firms would be helpful. This is not only because women need opportunities to work. The finance industry needs them, too: it is growing so fast that it is struggling to recruit and retain staff.
The message has sunk in in Bahrain, where a third of finance-sector employees are female, and in Kuwait, where, including property, the figure rises to 40%. Some employers there say they find female bankers work harder than men. Yet in Saudi Arabia, official statistics indicate that just 5% of Saudis working in finance and property are female. And across the region, it remains hard for female businesswomen to get loans, especially if they are not from prominent families. Even in Bahrain, where nearly one-third of businesses are registered by women, “sometimes women can only get a business licence in their husband's name, especially if they have less capital,” says Aamina Awan, who is researching female entrepreneurship in the region. Khadija may be a role model, but there is a long way to go before Gulf women can freely emulate her business success.
-- The Economist
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
Women’s Political Participation in the Gulf: A Conversation with Activists Fatin Bundagji (Saudi Arabia), Rola Dashti (Kuwait), and Munira Fakhro (Bah
What are the obstacles to greater political activism by women in the Gulf?
Dashti: There are many interlinked factors related to the religious and social environment as well as the attitude of political leaders, who have not taken a clear position: should women have a role in public life, private life only, or a mix of the two?
In the Gulf, there is a conflict between a modernizing and development-oriented perspective and a religious-tribal perspective. The latter fights to keep women at home and preserve the traditional arrangement of male domination of the public sphere and female limitation to the private sphere.
Men have succeeded in the public sphere to the extent that they are giving up their roles at home. The modernizing perspective promotes a partnership between men and women in public life, and citizenship rights and duties for both. The struggle between these two trends remains unresolved, and here the third force appears—the government role—which is unstable and swings back and forth, one day siding with the modernizers and the next day with religious and tribal elements. The media also can play an important role in this struggle by showing women in leadership roles.
Bundagji: The problem lies in raising and reshaping awareness, and here we have to go back to education, the importance of concentrating on the concept of citizenship and the rights and duties inherent in it, and on the cause of women’s rights and their role in public life.
As for the media in Saudi Arabia, they are very good and play a positive role regarding women’s problems and issues. They publicized, for example, the “Girl of Qatif” case (a rape victim initially sentenced to lashing and later pardoned by King Abdullah), as well as that of the businesswoman who drank a cup of coffee with a colleague at Starbucks and was arrested by the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice.
Fakhro: First, we must reform education, because men and women learn from the same state-provided curricula. Second, there must be reform on the level of ijtihad (interpretation) of the holy Quran; there must be modernization and development to suit the age and time. Morocco achieved an important accomplishment in this regard, namely the new family law (Moudawana), through a modern interpretation of the Quran. Turkey and Iran also have experiences from which we can benefit. We should not restrict ourselves to only Arab societies.
Our problem is the lack of seriousness of decision makers—who are tribalists and dictators—and their interest in maintaining the status quo. There is also the fact that society links men’s honor with women’s bodies, and so men are careful to keep women behind the walls of the home.
What is the impact of economic factors on women’s political participation?
Dashti: Women’s participation in the economies of the Gulf is growing; they now comprise 30-40 percent of the workforce. Their jobs have become necessary to support a family, but unfortunately women’s economic situation has not propelled them to seek high-ranking political offices. Despite their economic capabilities, women still are not economic decision-makers, even though there is no religious dispute over the right of women to manage their money.
There is also economic violence against women in the Gulf, through men’s control over women’s money. In some cases men give women an allowance out of the women’s own money, which of course weakens their independence. As if it were not enough that the woman is confined to her role at home, and then that the man has abandoned his role at home, now the man is taking control of her money!
Bundagji: There is a strong link between women’s political participation and economic development. Women’s participation in the decision-making process is necessary to ensure proper and balanced strategic planning that takes into account the social and economic needs of Saudi women. A recent report said that some 60 percent of female college graduates in Saudi Arabia do not get jobs, even though the state is investing heavily in educating women. This means that the economy is losing a lot by not benefiting from these female graduates. It is true that working women have a prominent presence in teaching and nursing, but they are absent from most sectors.
Fakhro: Since women have been permitted to work in other Gulf Cooperation Council countries, many Saudi women—most of them from the Eastern Province—have traveled to Kuwait and worked for very low salaries to escape from the bad situation in Saudi Arabia. They also went to work in Dubai at the invitation of its ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid.
In Bahrain, although many women have obtained much economic power through inheritance, they do not utilize the situation to their benefit. Many of them make husbands, sons, or older brothers their proxies, though some of them have been freed from this pattern.
Bundagji: Women in Saudi Arabia make up only 7 percent of the labor market. Even when women assume leadership positions in Saudi Arabia, they lack real decision-making powers. There are 150 men in the Shura Council and only six part-time female advisors. If I were one of them I would not have accepted the position, because it has no powers. There are 170 municipal councils, without a single woman member. The number of women in Saudi Arabia equals that of men, yet no woman can drive. Setting aside the question of a woman’s right to drive, consider the economic implications and how costly it is for a women to hire a foreign driver.
Fakhro: Saudi Arabia is holding back the whole region. Because it is a country with weight, and the largest in terms of population and area, it affects the progress of the other Gulf countries. The late King Faisal imposed women’s education by force. He was a reformer and powerful, but now the rulers do not want to educate their peoples nor do they want reform.
Women in Bahrain make up about 30 percent of the workforce, but they have not yet reached equality with men. In Bahrain, women head universities, professional associations, and civil organizations—elected by men. The women’s rights’ cause is very strong in Bahrain. There is a large opening for Bahrainis compared to their neighbors.
Do you support quotas for women’s political representation?
Bundagji: I support quotas.
Fakhro: As do I. It should be political parties, however, who implement quotas, as in France, where women make up 50 percent of the candidate slates. The quota by this means is better and fairer.
Dashti: I think that the quota need not be limited to legislative councils but also should apply to the executive bodies and councils, because that is where decision-making happens. Such a quota would be an important tool to abolish laws and other measures that marginalize women. Upon taking decision-making positions, women must work to achieve that.
Bundagji: But the quota can be a double-edged sword. What can guarantee us that women chosen by quota represent the majority of women, or reflect the diversity of society? The quota is useful as long as it achieves the goal of true representation of society.
Fakhro: The problem is that the decision to implement a quota is a government one, and the government will try to exploit the women representatives who owe their positions to it.
Unfortunately there are women, for example female ministers, who carry out government decisions against women. They are placed in leadership positions simply to preserve the state’s reputation before the West, not out of a belief in women’s participation.
What are the most important goals for women in your countries now?
Dashti: Strengthening genuine participation for women in decision-making positions, a media alliance to highlight the role of women and their presence in public life, and supporting and developing young female leaders.
Fakhro: I dream that there will be more women in decision-making positions and the integration of women into political life—that future generations will have what we did not have.
Bundagji: Saudi women need to guarantee their civil rights first. There must be educational reform, the integration of women into the basic service institutions and the chambers of commerce and municipal councils. If women are able to achieve that, they will be able to be in contact with the different levels of society. Another priority issue is stopping violence against children, a cause adopted by women, but we need specialized courts and understanding judges.
Women are an emerging informal power in Saudi Arabia and are changing the status quo. They are taking on the issue of obesity, for example, a major problem in the country. From a health perspective, defeating obesity requires exercise. Taking good health as a starting point, women are campaigning for walking as exercise, and this gives them a new public presence and freedom of movement. Similarly, women are demanding to drive. Ultimately, we hope that change will come through women themselves.
This interview was conducted by Michele Dunne and translated from Arabic by Paul Wulfsberg.
Dashti: There are many interlinked factors related to the religious and social environment as well as the attitude of political leaders, who have not taken a clear position: should women have a role in public life, private life only, or a mix of the two?
In the Gulf, there is a conflict between a modernizing and development-oriented perspective and a religious-tribal perspective. The latter fights to keep women at home and preserve the traditional arrangement of male domination of the public sphere and female limitation to the private sphere.
Men have succeeded in the public sphere to the extent that they are giving up their roles at home. The modernizing perspective promotes a partnership between men and women in public life, and citizenship rights and duties for both. The struggle between these two trends remains unresolved, and here the third force appears—the government role—which is unstable and swings back and forth, one day siding with the modernizers and the next day with religious and tribal elements. The media also can play an important role in this struggle by showing women in leadership roles.
Bundagji: The problem lies in raising and reshaping awareness, and here we have to go back to education, the importance of concentrating on the concept of citizenship and the rights and duties inherent in it, and on the cause of women’s rights and their role in public life.
As for the media in Saudi Arabia, they are very good and play a positive role regarding women’s problems and issues. They publicized, for example, the “Girl of Qatif” case (a rape victim initially sentenced to lashing and later pardoned by King Abdullah), as well as that of the businesswoman who drank a cup of coffee with a colleague at Starbucks and was arrested by the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice.
Fakhro: First, we must reform education, because men and women learn from the same state-provided curricula. Second, there must be reform on the level of ijtihad (interpretation) of the holy Quran; there must be modernization and development to suit the age and time. Morocco achieved an important accomplishment in this regard, namely the new family law (Moudawana), through a modern interpretation of the Quran. Turkey and Iran also have experiences from which we can benefit. We should not restrict ourselves to only Arab societies.
Our problem is the lack of seriousness of decision makers—who are tribalists and dictators—and their interest in maintaining the status quo. There is also the fact that society links men’s honor with women’s bodies, and so men are careful to keep women behind the walls of the home.
What is the impact of economic factors on women’s political participation?
Dashti: Women’s participation in the economies of the Gulf is growing; they now comprise 30-40 percent of the workforce. Their jobs have become necessary to support a family, but unfortunately women’s economic situation has not propelled them to seek high-ranking political offices. Despite their economic capabilities, women still are not economic decision-makers, even though there is no religious dispute over the right of women to manage their money.
There is also economic violence against women in the Gulf, through men’s control over women’s money. In some cases men give women an allowance out of the women’s own money, which of course weakens their independence. As if it were not enough that the woman is confined to her role at home, and then that the man has abandoned his role at home, now the man is taking control of her money!
Bundagji: There is a strong link between women’s political participation and economic development. Women’s participation in the decision-making process is necessary to ensure proper and balanced strategic planning that takes into account the social and economic needs of Saudi women. A recent report said that some 60 percent of female college graduates in Saudi Arabia do not get jobs, even though the state is investing heavily in educating women. This means that the economy is losing a lot by not benefiting from these female graduates. It is true that working women have a prominent presence in teaching and nursing, but they are absent from most sectors.
Fakhro: Since women have been permitted to work in other Gulf Cooperation Council countries, many Saudi women—most of them from the Eastern Province—have traveled to Kuwait and worked for very low salaries to escape from the bad situation in Saudi Arabia. They also went to work in Dubai at the invitation of its ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid.
In Bahrain, although many women have obtained much economic power through inheritance, they do not utilize the situation to their benefit. Many of them make husbands, sons, or older brothers their proxies, though some of them have been freed from this pattern.
Bundagji: Women in Saudi Arabia make up only 7 percent of the labor market. Even when women assume leadership positions in Saudi Arabia, they lack real decision-making powers. There are 150 men in the Shura Council and only six part-time female advisors. If I were one of them I would not have accepted the position, because it has no powers. There are 170 municipal councils, without a single woman member. The number of women in Saudi Arabia equals that of men, yet no woman can drive. Setting aside the question of a woman’s right to drive, consider the economic implications and how costly it is for a women to hire a foreign driver.
Fakhro: Saudi Arabia is holding back the whole region. Because it is a country with weight, and the largest in terms of population and area, it affects the progress of the other Gulf countries. The late King Faisal imposed women’s education by force. He was a reformer and powerful, but now the rulers do not want to educate their peoples nor do they want reform.
Women in Bahrain make up about 30 percent of the workforce, but they have not yet reached equality with men. In Bahrain, women head universities, professional associations, and civil organizations—elected by men. The women’s rights’ cause is very strong in Bahrain. There is a large opening for Bahrainis compared to their neighbors.
Do you support quotas for women’s political representation?
Bundagji: I support quotas.
Fakhro: As do I. It should be political parties, however, who implement quotas, as in France, where women make up 50 percent of the candidate slates. The quota by this means is better and fairer.
Dashti: I think that the quota need not be limited to legislative councils but also should apply to the executive bodies and councils, because that is where decision-making happens. Such a quota would be an important tool to abolish laws and other measures that marginalize women. Upon taking decision-making positions, women must work to achieve that.
Bundagji: But the quota can be a double-edged sword. What can guarantee us that women chosen by quota represent the majority of women, or reflect the diversity of society? The quota is useful as long as it achieves the goal of true representation of society.
Fakhro: The problem is that the decision to implement a quota is a government one, and the government will try to exploit the women representatives who owe their positions to it.
Unfortunately there are women, for example female ministers, who carry out government decisions against women. They are placed in leadership positions simply to preserve the state’s reputation before the West, not out of a belief in women’s participation.
What are the most important goals for women in your countries now?
Dashti: Strengthening genuine participation for women in decision-making positions, a media alliance to highlight the role of women and their presence in public life, and supporting and developing young female leaders.
Fakhro: I dream that there will be more women in decision-making positions and the integration of women into political life—that future generations will have what we did not have.
Bundagji: Saudi women need to guarantee their civil rights first. There must be educational reform, the integration of women into the basic service institutions and the chambers of commerce and municipal councils. If women are able to achieve that, they will be able to be in contact with the different levels of society. Another priority issue is stopping violence against children, a cause adopted by women, but we need specialized courts and understanding judges.
Women are an emerging informal power in Saudi Arabia and are changing the status quo. They are taking on the issue of obesity, for example, a major problem in the country. From a health perspective, defeating obesity requires exercise. Taking good health as a starting point, women are campaigning for walking as exercise, and this gives them a new public presence and freedom of movement. Similarly, women are demanding to drive. Ultimately, we hope that change will come through women themselves.
This interview was conducted by Michele Dunne and translated from Arabic by Paul Wulfsberg.
Gulf States: Gulf states between 'conservatism and change'
Conservative oil-rich Gulf monarchies need to introduce political reform and modernise their education systems as part of a comprehensive programme of change, regional experts say.
Gulf Arab states have undergone social change brought about by economic development, such as women's entry into the workforce, Saudi academic Khalid Al Dakhil told a conference in Abu Dhabi organised by the Emirates Centre for Strategic Studies and Research. What remains conspicuously absent in most of them is "political reform as part of a comprehensive reform programme", said Dakhil in a paper read on his behalf.
The three-day conference began on Monday under a theme which places the region "between conservatism and change". Speakers agreed that the emirate of Kuwait has gone further than any of its other Gulf Arab neighbours in democratising.
But Kuwaiti political science professor Abdullah Al Shayiji cautioned that "the Kuwaiti model touted as a prototype is facing a lot of challenges". Kuwait's Emir dissolved Parliament in March after a stand-off between the elected house and the government, and he called early polls for May.
Bahrain also has an elected parliament but it is counterbalanced by an appointed Upper House, while other Gulf states have consultative rather than legislative assemblies.
Political parties remain banned across the region, although political groups operate as de facto parties in Kuwait and Bahrain. "Gulf societies are outpacing the political regimes on the road to reform," Dakhil said.
And moves toward reform "appear to be in response to external pressures rather than to pressing internal social and political needs," he added in an apparent reference to US pressure on regional governments.
Saad Al Ajmi, a Kuwaiti liberal political activist and former information minister, said the conference's name should have placed the Gulf "between backwardness and change."
Conservatism does not preclude change, he argued, as evidenced by the record of conservative leaders such as former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher.
Ajmi said religion should be taught separately from school curricula in the Muslim Gulf region.
"Qualitative education" cannot be achieved by including Islamic teachings in the curricula of under-10-year-olds, he argued. Bahraini former education minister Ali Fakhro called for "fundamental modernisation" of the education system as part of a comprehensive modernisation drive.
The question of whether modernising education is a prelude to modernising society and politics or vice versa will remain a matter of debate, Fakhro said.
-- Agence France-Presse
Gulf Arab states have undergone social change brought about by economic development, such as women's entry into the workforce, Saudi academic Khalid Al Dakhil told a conference in Abu Dhabi organised by the Emirates Centre for Strategic Studies and Research. What remains conspicuously absent in most of them is "political reform as part of a comprehensive reform programme", said Dakhil in a paper read on his behalf.
The three-day conference began on Monday under a theme which places the region "between conservatism and change". Speakers agreed that the emirate of Kuwait has gone further than any of its other Gulf Arab neighbours in democratising.
But Kuwaiti political science professor Abdullah Al Shayiji cautioned that "the Kuwaiti model touted as a prototype is facing a lot of challenges". Kuwait's Emir dissolved Parliament in March after a stand-off between the elected house and the government, and he called early polls for May.
Bahrain also has an elected parliament but it is counterbalanced by an appointed Upper House, while other Gulf states have consultative rather than legislative assemblies.
Political parties remain banned across the region, although political groups operate as de facto parties in Kuwait and Bahrain. "Gulf societies are outpacing the political regimes on the road to reform," Dakhil said.
And moves toward reform "appear to be in response to external pressures rather than to pressing internal social and political needs," he added in an apparent reference to US pressure on regional governments.
Saad Al Ajmi, a Kuwaiti liberal political activist and former information minister, said the conference's name should have placed the Gulf "between backwardness and change."
Conservatism does not preclude change, he argued, as evidenced by the record of conservative leaders such as former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher.
Ajmi said religion should be taught separately from school curricula in the Muslim Gulf region.
"Qualitative education" cannot be achieved by including Islamic teachings in the curricula of under-10-year-olds, he argued. Bahraini former education minister Ali Fakhro called for "fundamental modernisation" of the education system as part of a comprehensive modernisation drive.
The question of whether modernising education is a prelude to modernising society and politics or vice versa will remain a matter of debate, Fakhro said.
-- Agence France-Presse
Monday, March 31, 2008
Kuwait: A guide for women’s rights and family law
Women’s rights in the family law in Kuwait and Shariah courts in Bahrain will be the focus of a study to be conducted soon as part of GCC women’s activists’ celebration to mark the International Women Day.
The Kuwaiti Chairwoman of the Cultural and Social Society Shaikha Al Nasaf said during the first GCC Forum that the study was divided to theatrical and practical as those conducting it would review family law in Kuwait and its commitment to protection of women’s rights and judgment differences between Jaffary and Sunni courts in Bahrain.
The study would also highlight activities conducted by the society and Bahrain’s Women Union and find mechanisms to enhance NGOs activities in empowering women.
The forum three-day event started on March 26 in Kuwait city and attracted activists from all GCC states.
Al Nasaf said that the society launched on March 8 a campaign entitled “Your Law is Your Light” to enhance women’s awareness on laws in general and the family law in particular.
The Bahrain’s delegation highlighted the long journey to pressure the government to comply Shariah principles in one law (family law) as the President of Women Union Mariam Al Ruwai said that activists had been fighting for the law for more than twenty years.
The debated law is facing mix reactions from the public as some are supporting it to regulate judgment process of court cases related to marriage, divorce, custody, alimony and inherences, while others object its importance as according to them the legislation is the first step to abandon Shariah judgments.
Al Ruwai said that the law would benefit all family members, mainly women. “Many women prefer to lead miserable marriage lives out of fear of being humiliated or mistreated at courts.”
While highlighting the benefits of the law, Al Ruwai explained that it wouldn’t bring magical solutions but situations at courts would be better after its implementation. “The role of the law could be reinforced with major reforms in the judicial authority, such as better criteria in selecting judges and the fast activation of the alimony fund.”
While highlighting the benefits of the law, Al Ruwai explained that it wouldn’t bring magical solutions but situations at courts would be better after its implementation. “The role of the law could be reinforced with major reforms in the judicial authority, such as better criteria in selecting judges and the fast activation of the alimony fund.”
UNIFEM’s Executive Director Mona Ghanim called upon NGOs and women movements to pressure governments of Arab world to implement family laws to deal affectively with legal disputes related to Shariah. She said that the forum was good chance to motivate activists to join efforts for more rights for women.
The forum highlighted the publishing of a guide to highlight Bahrain and Kuwait experiences in fighting for the implementation of the family law.
-- Women Gateway
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)