Social and Humanitarian Issues: Women’s Employment
“I collect cardboard and plastic daily in order to provide a living for me and my child”
-Lamia Khaled.
This is the case of Lamia, the Syrian refugee in Turkey after her husband died and she remained the only provider for her son and the supervisor of his education. Despite all these circumstances, she did not take her son out of school for the sake of completing his education. No matter how difficult life became, her son’s learning was a priority for her. [1]
History of Women’s Employment
When reading ancient history, it became clear to us that the main occupation of humans then was only agriculture, and hard work was not limited to men only, in addition to caring for children and the house, women used to do required hard physical effort such as grinding grain, carrying firewood, drawing and carrying water. Women had no rest periods except at childbirth. This traditional role of the housewife continued throughout the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century, with the presence of electrical energy and the invention of effort-saving devices that helped reduce the effort and exhaustion of the housewife such as washing machines and vacuum cleaners, but it only reduced the time it takes for women to do the housework.
In general, women’s jobs outside their homes were associated with their usual household chores, as many women who lost their family’s breadwinner used to work from inside their homes sewing clothes and selling them to shop owners or as housemaids for the rich; afterward, the social and economic developments helped change the nature of women’s work, the growth of education led to an increase in the demand for teachers, office work and sales agents; as employers found that they could hire women at lower wages than men considering that men were responsible for the maintenance of the family, while women in these jobs were mostly single women and therefore could be paid less. [2]
During the first and second world wars, women were recruited for voluntary or paid work in order to send men to the armed forces, which created new fields for women’s jobs such as ammunition factories, driving buses, and managing banks and offices, which helped societies accept the idea of women’s employment, but this negatively affected when the war ended and the men returned, as women continued to work alongside men but with lower wages, which led to decline women’s work a step back at that time. [3]
Women’s Employment Around the World
The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development emphasized the need to provide good quality jobs for all and social equality for all, with the aim of reducing poverty, achieving gender equality, and promoting economic growth in all countries, but this seems difficult to achieve because, despite the increase in the educational attainment rate of women compared to Men and the efforts of countries and the United Nations to achieve this, many women around the world are still in the midst of suffering when starting their professional or practical path, starting from the difficulty of finding a good quality job opportunity and the transition to income inequality with men, which negatively affects women’s economic life. [4; p.1]
Statistics published in 2018 indicated that the female labour force participation rate of 48.5% in 2018 is still 26.5 (percentage points) lower than the male participation rate, in addition to that for every ten working men there are only six women working. Women face major gaps in the quality of the professions they practice, as the percentage of women working in family businesses is still more than twice that of men, and working conditions are often characterized by weakness and fragility, as there are no written work contracts and lack of respect for labor laws, in addition to the small number of women in managerial positions due to obstacles in the labour market Women are prevented from working in managerial positions. [5]
Perhaps the problem of the Taliban’s control of leadership and governance in Afghanistan is one of the biggest problems in this regard around the world, and after Afghan women were able to increase their academic experiences and enter the labour market and politics during the past two decades, the Taliban movement’s control of the country came in an attempt to abolish everything the Afghan women achieved, they prevented Afghan women from working and getting into taxis without a man with them, and many female teachers were dismissed from schools. [6]
Women’s Employment in the Arab Countries
As for Arab countries, what makes the work conditions of women most difficult is the prevalent social thinking that women are not entitled to work; there’s also the problem of harassment that may prevent many women from their dreams and desires for life, in addition to the fact that the burdens of caring for children and the elderly often fall on women. Despite some progress in education enrollment rates, women’s enrollment in science, engineering, and mathematics fields that provide higher-paying jobs is still lower, despite female excellence in education in general, which led to reinforcing that women get low-income jobs and increase the wage discrimination gap by gender. [7]
Also read: Honour Crime.
Women’s Employment in Syria and the Effects of War
The war has burdened the Syrian woman with great concerns and burdens and blew up all her dreams of a beautiful life. Many Syrian women have taken the role of a father and breadwinner outside the home, in addition to their main roles in caring for the home and taking care of children, the Syrian woman has floundered between her desires to pay attention to her children and to take care of their upbringing and studies; the issue does not stop here, as when a woman chooses a job to work with, the first thing she thinks about is who will take care of the children during her absence, especially if her husband or breadwinner is not present, which increases the burden on her; this made many Syrian women work in bad conditions and limited income just to demand what is enough to live and sustain life. Statistics indicate that the female labor force is 4 times that of men in Syria, and the crisis has forced Syrian women to try all kinds of professions, including construction, electricity, health care supply, and driving, in addition to previous work such as sewing, farming, and education. [8]
The problem of war and displacement in Syria did not only affect women but extended to include Syrian girls who were forced to marry out of fear of circumstances and in an effort to relieve the financial burdens on their families, even if the person does not match the girl’s age and intellectual qualifications, in addition to the increase in the rate of underage marriages and the high school dropout for girls as a result of fear for them. [9]
In conclusion, our initiative sees this problem as a great challenge, and all segments of society must cooperate together in order to help women overcome these circumstances of war that faced everyone, and this is what the initiative sought by providing workshops and training courses in many fields to help Syrian women find a job opportunity that brings her a decent living and an income that secures her basic needs.
♀️ Uplifting Syrian Women Initiative aims at sustainable peace building in Syria through targeting women and providing them with free online courses, workshops, discussion sessions and trainings, with a view to achieving the goals of Gender Equality, Quality Education and Decent Work and Economic Growth, which all fall into the interest of society as a whole and serve the purpose of rebuilding it.
References:
[1] AJ+
[2] Britannica
[4] International Labour Organization-PDF
[5] International Labour Organization
[6] France 24
[7] Albank Aldawli
[8] Syrian Women for Democracy
[9] Suwar Magazine
