AMMAN: As Middle Eastern economies chug through an age of drooping trade barriers and the privatization of just about everything, many states are finding themselves pressed to maintain breakneck growth rates just to keep up with rocketing food and energy prices.
For many activists, this has been a chance to bolster their side in a longtime struggle: getting women into the workplace.
But securing a foothold for women in Middle Eastern and North African economies is still fraught with challenges here, including a shrinking public sector, deep cultural biases and a dearth of sex-specific data, according to many of the speakers at a two-day conference hosted by the Euromed Role of Women in Economic Life Program, which was held in Jordan earlier this week.
“Women empowerment is no longer a luxury, but a fundamental requirement for economic growth, said Soheir Al Ali, the Jordanian Minister for Planning and International Cooperation, in the conference’s inaugural speech.
Earlier this year, a World Economic Forum report listed barriers to women working as one of the foremost reasons that Egypt’s “business competitiveness ranking has slid for three years running.
Just diagnosing problems can be tricky, because many states do not keep data that differentiates between the sexes, said Dr Camillia Fawzi El Solh, an economist and activist.
Language sometimes causes snags as well; the distinction between gender and sex, for instance, has no clear analogy in Arabic. The word “female head of household is not used in most Arabic texts, El Solh said. The closest equivalent is “a woman supporting the family, she said. “The jargon we use in English is not the jargon we use at a community level.
A recent rush to sell off government holdings throughout the region has also put many women’s livelihoods at risk, as women here tend to prefer the public sector, where there are strong anti-discrimination policies. This is a danger in Egypt, where state-owned banks and department stores have been auctioned off and foreign developers are being granted contracts to build public schools.
The private sector can be unfriendly to women, partially due to the “opportunity costs of employing them, El Solh said. Even when laws regulate the market, employers find ways around them. In some cases, even if employers are not allowed to discriminate on the basis of pregnancy, they may offer six-month renewable contracts that are cut off if a woman becomes visibly pregnant, she said.
Then there is war, rarely a distant thought for countries like Lebanon and Iraq. Integrating women into an economic system whose very existence is threatened by conflict is an obviously difficult task. One guest at the Jordan conference questioned whether Palestinians could even use the term “economy when they spoke about these issues, as they do not have direct control over their economic institutions.
It is not all so bleak. Christine Kashar, president of women’s rights group MAWRED, presented a sanguine view of progress made in Syria in recent years. She pointed out that Syria inaugurated a female vice president, former culture minister Najah Al-Attar, in 2006 and that female employees in that country are allowed to complain to the Ministry of Labor for a wage hike if they think they are being paid unevenly.
Recently, Kashar continued, she even saw a woman driving a microbus.
