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.

Shopping and the Gendered Pursuit of Happiness

Once we used to build civilisations. Now we build shopping malls.
-- Author Bill Bryson



Priorities might have shifted in the 21st Century but as a species, we are yet to uncouple ourselves from traditional gendered roles that continue to heavily influence our choices and decisions. This blog aims to exemplify this sociological phenomenon through a quintessential activity of the modern man: shopping.



Gender is undoubtedly the most powerful determinant of how a person views the world and everything in it. And shopping is yet another everyday activity that remains heavily gender influenced.

WOMAN

Rarely does one come across a woman whose eyes don’t light up at the very mention of the word “shopping.”



She is more-than-happy to "meander endlessly through sprawling clothing and accessory collections or detour through the shoe department. She likes to glide up glass escalators past a grand piano, or spray a perfume sample on themselves on their way to, maybe, making a purchase" (Wharton research, retrieved from http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/). She will revel her senses of sight and touch, running her fingers though chiffon silks or tirelessly browsing a mall from end-to-end: pausing, touching, feeling, even for things she knows she will never buy.



MAN

Enter the man-- the counterpart from Mars-- for whom shopping is a whole different ballgame. Plainly speaking, it is a mission of sorts.

Of sacrifices I recall
One stands out clear to me
Like when my wife asks me to come
On one of her shopping sprees

When a man walks in a mall, he knows precisely what he is to buy. The very targeted item makes it into the trolley, after which, without looking left or right, the man “flees the store as quickly as possible.” He knows, for instance, that he needs milk and bread, buys just that, and leaves nonchalantly without a second glance.




A man knows what he wants to get
And buys it on the spot
But a woman must deliberate
Whether she should buy it or not.



A study about supermarket shopping behavior assessed the time taken, basket size and expenditure of male shoppers. Not surprisingly, findings indicated that “men bought fewer items and thus took less time to complete the shopping task." However, unlike what the cartoon suggests, the male’s expenditure was found to be higher per minute because "men seldom comparison-shop" (Gender difference and Store Characteristics Study, 2007).

The study interestingly concluded that most men could easily be categorized in either of the three stereotypical models of male shopping behavior:

Grab and Go:


Whine and Wait:


Fear of the Feminine:



I tag along from store to store
And hope she soon will find
An item that at last she likes
So she’ll make up her mind.
(The poet, obviously, falls in the ‘Whine and Wait’ category!)




This contrast can be assessed in the way in which the different genders value a shopping experience, say at Doha’s Villagio mall. Sprawled lavishly across hundreds of kilometers of retail space, the bustling mega-shopping center is designed to “transport every buyer to an Italian village by the sea.”



Characterised by “flashy designs, bright lights and abundant variety,” Villagio has inspired consumer appeal by summating the entire planet under one roof (David Grazian, Mix it Up, p177).



For women, it is the sight of these very malls that “turns our fantasy life on.” A wholesome shopping experience, in this case, is sparked by “the multisensory, and emotive aspects of their experience with products” (Hedonic Consumption, retrieved from www.jstor.org/stable/1251707). Further, shopping is considered a mode of inter-personal communication. For example, following is one woman’s description of employees in a favorite store, as part of a research interview:
"The sales associates are always great. They always show me different styles. They will show me something new that's come in."

Meanwhile, a man in the same age bracket (18-35) mused that, "I haven't had much interaction with most sales people. I don't really need them -- as long as they're at the checkout."



Thus, in stark contrast to women, men tend to respond typically to “more utilitarian aspects of the experience -- such as the availability of parking, whether the item they came for is in stock, and the length of the checkout line” (Men Buy, Women Shop, retrieved from http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/)



This trend is amazingly analogous to a contemplation in author John Gray’s book, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. Men, believes the author, "are more interested in `objects' and `things' rather then people and feelings," while women “value love, communication, beauty, and relationships.”



Or, it could be that even in a modern hybrid society, we have inadvertently retained a strong bond with our ancestral homo-sapien-ness.

Author of Why we Buy and CEO of an NY consulting firm,Paco Underhill, reasons it thus:

It used to be that men were hunters. If they went into a store they had to kill something and drag it out the door to feel successful. On the other hand, the female of the species was programmed to be a gatherer. She actually got some pleasure from the act of looking and got some reward for being the family purchasing agent. (Living on Earth: Sociology of Shopping, retrieved from http://www.loe.org).



This thought-provoking notion can well justify the following not-too-unheard-of rant:

An old girlfriend once asked me to accompany her window-shopping. Bemused, I did so, unable to believe we wouldn't make at least a few purchases. Instead, we spent the whole day traipsing across town, walking into and around shops, and literally peering into windows for the pure pleasure of browsing the latest fashions.

We bought absolutely nothing, and indeed she was broke at the time and had never intended to. As a male, I considered it the strangest afternoon I had ever spent - going to shops with the express intention of buying nothing.

She, however, was absolutely radiant, having spent an extremely enjoyable afternoon revelling in the shopping experience, unencumbered by the irrelevant annoyance of actually purchasing something.

Underhill justifies such incidences in a woman’s in-built ability to genuinely enjoy a shopping experience. Even if she winds up buying nothing, the time she would have spent looking around the store would have been anything but a mechanical chore.

“As I move through a store," Underhill said in a 2006 interview, "and I’m looking at goods my mind is taking whatever it is and dividing it into the lifestyle that I have versus the lifestyle that I might want to have. This is part of the reason why particularly two women can go to a shopping mall, spend an entire day, buy nothing and have a fabulous time.”

The poet, meanwhile, continues to grumble about his indecisive wife:

I feel I would rather walk the dog
Than plod through stores and shops
With him, at least I have a leash
To cut down on his stops.

(Poem: Of Shops and Dogs, retrieved from http://www.things-to-say.com/humor-clean/shopping.htm)

What Makes Her Masculine.

We all grow up one of two sexes, with biological characteristics that identify us as being male or female. From the minute we are born we’re automatically part of a culture that differentiates our gender into social and cultural aspects of being one of either sexes. Gender socialization, which is the process where people learn the norms related to their sex and gender, happens to every single baby. Even as really young groups, gender socialization automatically splits girls and boys as two separate groups. According to any sociologist, all these differences that we see between men and women aren’t natural, but are all socialized or socially constructed.

As a female who grew up in a Palestinian, Arabic culture, I most definitely was socialized into a specific category, femininity. All my physical, behavioral, mental and emotional traits characterize me as a female. I wear dresses, skirts, and jewelry. I cross my legs when I sit. I cry quite often and I’m not embarrassed to say that I do. I try not to use foul language, because that is “not how a lady acts.” That is one of the things I hear my parents and family say every once in a while, that a lady isn’t supposed to use foul language, talk and laugh loudly in public and talk in a very rough manner. At least in my culture, a girl is supposed to be and act like a lady because in my religion many different lines from the Quran and sayings by the Prophet, PBUH, exemplifies a lady as a pearl or diamond, that is so delicate. For me to be that pearl or diamond, I can’t do many things in public, especially in front of men.

It’s considered deviance in my culture for a woman to smoke. Women get negatively sanctioned if they have a cigarette in their hand or if they smoke a hookah.


Smoking is considered to be a masculine habit, which automatically gives off a manly image. Many women smoke in public regardless of these cultural sanctions. This gives women power in such a culture, where women are said to be powerless. This could be considered to be a very masculine form of power based on domination and control, by simply holding a cigarette and going against all these negative sanctions. According to Sutherland, this form of power, which in a sociological perspective is called “power-over,” could be problematic because it’s abusive. So, smoking among women could influence other women to do it only to receive that kind of power as well, regardless off all the obvious health risks.