Arab women face uphill struggle for more rights

[Al-khiyal]

“The laws are positive, but what does the picture in the school books show? It still shows a woman chopping vegetables.”

Arab women are taking more senior government posts than before but many are still years away from challenging men’s domination of key decision-making positions, a top UN official said yesterday.

Several Arab states have allocated parliamentary seats and cabinet portfolios for women, but the failure to challenge stereotypes depicting women as inferior to men could hamper such progress, UN Under Secretary-General Mervat Tallawy said.

“Despite the many achievements in the last five years, women in the Arab world are still far from equality and still face many challenges,” said Tallawy, also executive secretary of the Beirut-based Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia.

“Soap operas still give the woman roles where she sits and chops vegetables while the man is sitting in front of a computer. The woman cries and screams in the face of the first problem, while the man is wise,” she told Reuters.

Not enough efforts to educate men about the importance of women’s political participation, argued Tallawy, makes it hard to preserve the gains that pro-women legislation has secured or to move beyond them....

Arab women face uphill struggle for more rights

Arab women still discriminated against

[Al-khiyal]

Syria’s first female vice president hailed as progress for women

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[Bent_Bladi]

Woo!! go syria!! hehe

[Al-khiyal]

.....Record numbers of Egyptian women are holding jobs, and the variety of careers open to them is rising. Women serve as bank CEOs, newspaper editors, university deans, and government ministers. One has been appointed a judge.

In 1996, 18 percent of Egyptian women worked outside the home. By 2004, 31 percent did, according to a United Nations report. Although there is no single explanation for the increase, experts do see some trends.

Relatively affluent women are marrying later than their mothers did, giving them an additional decade in the working world, says Hania Sholkamy, a professor at the American University of Cairo. Some university departments, such as medicine and humanities, now graduate as many women as men.

But most Egyptian women take jobs "in an effort to escape the cycle of poverty," Ms. Sholkamy says.

Forty-five percent of the country's women are illiterate, which limits their opportunities to low-wage labor.....

Egypt's changing career climate