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?!"

Our Identity Though Our Costumes

It’s amazing how we can tell a person’s identity and his/her position in life by just looking at the way they dress or act. In almost everywhere you go to, there will always be people that have different jobs. In every home, people have positions and roles. For example, the parents are the ones in control. When entering any home for the first time, you can immediately tell who are the parents, the children, and the servants if there were any. These observations come naturally. Some of these observations are an ascribed status. Age and ethnicity is an ascribed status. By looking at the person, you can naturally tell their age group and their ethnicity by their appearance. However a mother on the other hand is an achieved status, she chose to build her family

The way people dress is based on who they are in the society. When you see the people in your everyday life, you assume what their job is from their costume. Uniforms of any kind of job act as a status symbol. For example, you can identify a police officer through his uniform. There are also other costumes that are common in our everyday life. Examples are: Workers, housemaids, school students, chefs and businessmen.

The costumes make it easier for people to identify who these people are. People have different jobs based on how they are dressed. For example, if you are in a restaurant you tell the waiter what you would like to order. You know who the waiter is and call him because of the uniform.

The army on the other hand is part of the mechanical solidarity. They all act and think in the same way with the same costume. An army cannot be an army without a large group of people in order to perform the job correctly. In most cases the groups such as a basketball team or an army are considered as ingroups. They have a connection between each other and they are closely tied to each other to form a team.

Mini East Asia in Qatar