By Emma Gatten
BEIRUT: Turn on Lebanese television,
open a newspaper or news website and you can be sure of one thing: It won’t be
long before you see a man in a suit, whether he’s talking about politics, the
economy, or just the weather.
But in among them are many Lebanese
women, excelling in their careers, often against the expectations of those
around them. On the occasion of International Women’s Day, The Daily Star
talked to three women who have worked their way to the top of their
professions.
“I was 100 percent aware of the male
dominance in politics when I went in,” says Ghinwa Jalloul, a former Beirut MP,
of her experience running for office in the 2000 elections. “Beirut had never
been represented by a woman and that made it a bigger challenge for me.”
Running on Rafik Hariri’s list
against then-Prime Minister Salim Hoss, Jalloul faced down critics who said she
was a token candidate.
“People used to say ‘you’re put
there to lose so they can say at least a woman has tried,’” she says. “But
while they were discussing this in interviews, I was out seeing the people and
telling them why they should vote for me.” She won the election and went on to
be an MP for nine years.
For Mayada Baydas, the executive
director of EMKAN, a company that provides microfinance loans, developing her
career outside the country, in the West and developing countries, allowed her
to bypass many of the constraints she sees other professional women face in
Lebanon.
“Women don’t predominate boards,
they don’t predominate management positions,” she says. “I came back to Lebanon
being an executive ... so I did not face what the working women of Lebanon who
develop for maybe 10 years in Lebanon do face.”
She sees women struggling against a
reluctance on the part of companies to invest in their professional
development. “They feel that women have reached their top plateau, and women
feel that they will not get supported further for higher managerial jobs
because of certain biases in the minds of executive management,” she says.
Both Baydas and Jalloul agree that
the country is far from lacking in female talent.
“We have a caliber of highly
educated women,” says Jalloul. “When they are put to the competition they are
better than many men.”
The question then is why women are
underrepresented across sectors in Lebanon. Baydas also believes part of the
problem is what women expect for their own lives. “I think if we go into the
female group we see, to some degree, self-selection by women and perhaps some
cultural trends and elements that do not truly present incentives or even a lot
of support for women to pursue their education through higher degrees and
careers.
“I think women make this decision
either along the way at one point of their education or at the point where they
choose to pursue a career, or to pursue, you know, making a family or a home,”
she says.
She attributes her family’s commitment
to her education in part to their Palestinian background.
“My late dad used to say ‘education
is your weapon,’” she says. “My aunts were MDs and engineers and so on, so it
is part of the family culture that education is very important. Not to say it’s
not for many Lebanese, but the female group tends to be a little sheltered
sometimes. So it is perhaps favored that a young woman may go and get married
rather than pursuing a career.”
For Gretta Taslakian, an
Olympic-level sprinter who won two gold medals for Lebanon in the 2007 Pan Arab
Games in Egypt, having female role models and hearing the experience of fellow
women in the field is vital to her success.
“I do have close female athlete
friends who are actually very big in the field, including Jamaican [Shelly
Ann-Fraser] who won the Beijing 100 meters in 2008,” she says. “We are very
close ... this is an amazing push for me. It’s important to have other strong
women around me. It’s important to gain experience from them.”
Promoting female sports role models
in the media is important, she says, to encourage other girls to enter the
field.
“Girls need an extra push. If we go
deep, women in Lebanon, many would be happy to see someone like me,” she says.
Those role models are lacking, she says, partly because the media is not
interested in women’s sports.
“If you look at a male Lebanese
basketball match you see they are everywhere on the TV, radio, newspapers,
everybody talks about it although they never competed in [major] games,”
Taslakian says. “I’ve competed in so many things, but my portfolio is nothing
compared to theirs.”
Taking on the expectations of
society and the professional peers often means going the extra mile. “I visited
almost every house in Beirut [when I was running], telling them why I wanted to
be an MP,” says Jalloul. “You have to explain more. They wouldn’t ask a man
‘why do you want to be an MP, they take him for granted. But for me it was ‘why
do you want to become an MP?’”
Once in Parliament, she continued to
face scrutiny from some MPs who were vocal about their doubts of having a woman
parliamentarian. “When I knew about them I used to go and meet with them,” she
says. “I would ask them ‘what’s your problem?’”
For all three women, family support
has also been key to their success, particularly, in Jalloul and Baydas’ case,
when it comes to balancing motherhood with their own career development.
“It’s a really big challenge to
balance that and feel happy within yourself,” says Jalloul. “I wouldn’t have
went through that without my family.”
Baydas agrees that without the full
support of her family, particularly the help from her mother when it came to
child care, she would not have been able to have the career she has had.
“It’s about being able to secure what you need
to on the personal front,” she says. “If my partner had not supported my
pursuing all of this it may have been difficult and it may have been a choice I
would have had to make.”http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Local-News/2012/Mar-08/165912-women-struggle-to-reach-new-heights-in-lebanon.ashx#axzz1oM3eP0Kk
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