The Dilemma of Being a Female!

     The gender rules in Qatar are very discriminative toward females in so many aspects. Ladies know these aspects and they also know not to cross them. I’ll provide few examples of those rules in this blog and I’m going to analyze it in such a way to reflect what are those rules. The book "Cinematic Sociology" mentioned how the social construction of any society categorizes how people act toward each other based on gender. This provides the people of a guidance of how to interact between each other as a society.

     The first example, is about the workers in Qatar; all of them are males, like the construction workers and the security guardes in Education City. There are only two exceptions, like, the female security guard in Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar and in Northwestern University in Qatar Studio. Even the workers outside of the studio building are males. The logic behind this is the idea of "building" and "protection" is often associated with males.

     Another example is when I went to the desert with Northwestern Evanston exchange students. There was no Qatari females who practiced falconry, which is a sport exclusive to men.

     However, a Germen lady arrived and I was very impressed by her. She had embraced the Qatari culture by covering her hair with a Qatari scarf that is initially designed to be worn by men. Its not just that she works in a field that dominated by men, but she also embraced the aspect of how men dress. Her ability to redefine the social construction was, again, very impressive.

     In the year that I have driven a car , I never seen a woman in a car wash or drop her car off by the garage, which is the third aspect of how females are discriminated against by the social construction that society created. This is due to the mentality that this is a "man’s job" to drive.  So I decided for the sake of experiment, to go there one more time and see how it is like.

     What I had anticipated was correct. There was no women there. It is worthy to mention that ladies can break the cultural rule sometimes and go there for a car wash, if they are willing to endure the awkwardness of workers and other drivers staring at them with one question at their minds: "What the hell are you doing here?!"

Qatari Women Are Breaking Barriers

March 8, 2013 was the International Women’s Day. I’m dedicating this week’s blog to give recognition to Qatari women have taken the initiative to change the Qatari society by breaking barriers. It is very important to highlight the fact that many Qatari women are educated, and “According to the CIA World Factbook, the literacy rate of females in Qatar is 88.6%, one of the highest in the Arab world,” (Qatar Visitor). Therefore, these educated women play a big role in helping Qatar economically and socially grow and develop. In the past, women in Qatar were mostly doing the household work and the man used to be the breadwinner. We learned in the Cinematic Sociology book that the in the traditional breadwinner-homemaker type of family life, the husband works and earns money to support the entire nuclear family, whereas the wife does the house chores and takes care of her children. Qatari families used to function or follow that type of system, but it has drastically changed in the past few decades. Now Qatari women are competing with Qatari men in the work field. More than 70% of females have a bachelor degree in Qatar, (Qatar Today). Qatari women are already holding professional jobs in hospitals, schools, universities, companies, media, and other fields. Women’s life doesn’t depend on marriage. More women are pursing their education and thinking of building their own career path. There are a lot of Qatari women who have also started their own businesses. Women have opened their own abaya, cupcake, and clothing shops. Below are pictures of businesses that are running by Qatari women and women working in the media. Women who get married don’t just sit at home but they also choose to work. The Cinematic Sociology book describes the second shift as the jobs that working wives do to run the household after they finish the workday. We see married Qatari women who work while they still have a husband and a house to take care of. The book described Hochschild’s study where she identified three types of couples. The first types is traditional couples where both the husband and the wife work outside home but the wife is required to come home to do her duties as a mother, which involves cooking, cleaning, laundry, and so on. The husband is only expected to do the traditional male tasks such as fixing something in the house or the car. Usually, married couples in Doha would fall under this category. The man comes home from work, and he expects his food to be prepared, as his wife makes sure that this is something that is taken care of. The second type is called transitional, and it’s when the husband helps his wife with the household stuff. The third type is egalitarian and usually the husband and the wife share the house work together by diving the work with each other, but the woman is expected to do the majority of the work because she’s more organized and more likely to have things done. As they say, behind every great man there is a great woman. Women are the foundation of the house and they have to help and support their husbands in order to maintain a healthy, successful marriage. The video below shows how Arab women including Qatari women are breaking barriers in the State of Doha.

Breaking Barriers - Arab Women from Zeena Kanaan on Vimeo.