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BARRIERS HINDER FEMALE PROFESSIONALS
BY GEOFFREY CRAIG
Few people ever rise to the pinnacle of their profession. But a quick survey of Egypt’s business and government leaders reveals only a handful of women in senior management positions. Women enter the professional work force in large numbers, only to quickly discover a glass ceiling.
“You find women everywhere, but not at the higher positions. And when you get to the higher positions, it’s one, two or three. Now we have [female] ministers, but how many?” asks Heba Nassar, a vice president of Cairo University and the highest-ranking female ever to serve in the century-old institution.
A recent study by the World Economic Forum noted that 30 percent of all professionals and technical workers in Egypt are women, but a mere 10 percent are legislators, senior officials and managers. And only two of the 31 ministers in the cabinet are female.
The only female attorney in her law firm when she began working, Mona Zulficar – now a senior partner at Shalakany Law Office – recalls the “extra challenge” she had to overcome.
“When I met the clients or I participated in a negotiation of a transaction or a contract, first I had to prove to the clients, and then the other party, that this ‘little girl’ can make sense, and they can afford to listen to her advice... So I always had to start first by proving myself.”
Part of the reason why women are less likely to gain senior positions lies in the deep-rooted views of the female role in Egyptian society. While the concept of women working in an office may be totally commonplace, a separate notion endures that females ideally shoulder a greater share of the burden related to raising a family.
Women assume the responsibility for running the household and looking after the children, in addition to working, so this results in difficult decisions concerning how to divide their time, says Fatma Khafagy, who has worked in the field of gender equality for 25 years.
“Men aren’t cooperating in the household work and helping to raise the children,” she emphasizes. “Maybe it’s on the increase, but very slowly. And services for women, such as day-care centers, are not really increasing at the same pace as jobs in the private sector.”
Many women say their careers must take a backseat to their families because the commitments are so heavy. It’s plausible to continue working, but reaching the upper echelons of a company suddenly becomes difficult.
“If you work in a bank and you get married and have children, you will not get promoted and will never become director of the bank, or general manager,” says Alia El Mahdi, a labor economist and dean of the Faculty of Economics and Political Science at Cairo University.
“It would be impossible, unless my mother takes the children, and I have a staff to take care of the babies. Usually, women reach a certain level and don’t go beyond it in the private sector.”
Egypt’s labor law provides for a three-month paid maternity leave twice in a woman’s lifetime, according to local legal experts. In addition, either parent may take as much as a year of unpaid leave to care for a newborn.
In practice, most people interviewed said the public sector was more accommodating of maternity leave than private businesses, which may be more concerned with the bottom line.
On the other hand, men have more latitude to work late, travel and switch jobs. They have also had an easier time taking assignments abroad, which often boosts an employee’s ability to move through a company’s hierarchy, or find a higher position at a different firm.
Neveen El Tahri, chairperson of the Delta Group of Companies, which is involved in brokerage, asset management and investment banking, began her career in corporate banking in the 1980s. She recalls how male colleagues often left for banking jobs in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, while she and her female colleagues stayed behind in Egypt. “A lot of men went to the Gulf, and the women remained in place,” she says.
Today, the situation has improved, El Tahri believes. It’s not uncommon to hear of a woman accepting a position in Dubai, for example.
Companies may argue that promotions boil down to effort and ability rather than gender, but this thinking ignores the fact that the deck may be stacked against women in the first place, critics argue. Moreover, some companies assume that a woman will opt for a family over career, and preclude them from promotions outright.
In other circumstances, employees may simply be uncomfortable with the notion of having female bosses or peers. While some fields, such as banking, public relations and development, have had women in their ranks for years, other areas are just opening up.
Amira Samy had graduated from the American University in Cairo with a Bachelor’s degree in physics when an international oilfield services company hired her in 2000 as a line engineer. At the time, oil rigs were exclusively male domains, and she recalls the work crew’s startled reaction when she arrived for training.
“The manager sent me back home. He said, ‘You can’t have a female on a rig.’ Everyone working on the rig was shocked: ‘Oh my God, there’s a girl,’” she says.
Yet gaining onsite experience was considered a prerequisite for joining the company’s executive ranks, Samy points out. Unable to work in Egypt, the only option was taking assignments outside the region, so she accepted work in Indonesia and then Thailand, an admittedly atypical move for an Egyptian woman, she acknowledges.
“For an Egyptian, that’s too weird, leaving the country and working in an oil rig full of men. It was unacceptable and everyone thought I was crazy.”
Otherwise, the choice to stay at home would’ve meant essentially abandoning her career. While this kind of gender discrimination is technically illegal under the constitution and labor law, women have not had an effective recourse available to pursue change, notes Zulficar. “The problem is not the law; the problem is implementation.”
Other experts express the same complaint about the lack of enforcement. For instance, an ombudsperson office was established in 2002 at the National Council for Women, a body established by presidential decree in 2000, to investigate complaints about discrimination and issue findings.
Khafagy, who ran the ombudsperson office for four years, says they received about 6,000 complaints a year, but were unable to take legal action to enforce compliance or give compensation to victims for lost wages.
“Ideally, [as in] in other countries, [the ombudsperson’s office] has the power to demand that the person who discriminated against a woman at the workplace rectify their mistake,” Khafagy says. “They have the power of financially compensating this person. For instance, if a woman is due for a promotion, and is [deserving], and hasn’t received one for the past two years, you could tell the employer that he has to give her the promotion, and to compensate her for not paying her [a higher salary for two years].”
Zulficar, along a similar line, is pushing for the creation of an equal opportunities commission. “This commission would receive petitions, but also have the right to proactively ask institutions – governmental, public and private – to demonstrate that they have equal opportunities and a non-discrimination plan, and if they have any discriminatory practices, how they plan to eliminate such discrimination. So it would not be just a complaint receiver, but a proactive monitoring organization that helps institutions become compliant over time.”
Such a commission would also have the ability to go to the courts if it were unable to remedy any wrongdoing on its own, Zulficar says.
Even without litigation, progress seems possible if employers reconsider a woman’s midcareer break as an opportunity, rather than a stumbling block. That is the suggestion of Sherine Ghoneim, Cairo director of Global Development Network, an association of policy and research institutes.
Of course, taking time off to start a family is universal, but some countries have developed techniques to become more flexible, allowing women to pursue educational plans and career-building so they can return to work without penalties. It’s not so different than someone who leaves work for a few years to pursue a postgraduate degree.
“You are sometimes able to use that midcareer break to advance your career, by academic study, or doing your own research, so the break isn’t strictly a break as such,” Ghoneim argues. Likewise, there could also be an arrangement made for part-time work or telecommuting.
Over the years, women have closed the gap with men in terms of skills and education. However, this progress has yet to translate into more women in senior management positions. It would be difficult to measure, but the loss in female talent has certainly been a blow to many companies’ performance.
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