Written by Diana Ishaqat

Working women remain a controversy in the region, where experts ranging from psychologists to religious leaders can be heard on television and radio shows, ¹²³⁴⁵⁶ attempting to justify, defend or condemn the presence of women in the workforce. Not having the lived experience⁷ of a woman in the Arab World is not uncommon among the invited public figures. Yet, whether with or against, they seem to be trusted with the “analysis” of a woman’s psyche, anatomy and “nature”, and these mechanisms’ “compatibility” with what it takes to get a job and sustain one.

I’m intrigued by what makes up everyday life. Yes, the phenomenon, life-turning events too, but especially the everyday. Therefore I find the journey of a woman to her workplace or her aspirations to get to one, truly remarkable. There are so many complex decisions to make, influenced by class, faith, color, history, urban design, and the list goes on. Not once in life or every now and then, but repeatedly; consciously or subconsciously. Variables may differ but choices made to stay safe, sane, and at times, alive, appear to be constants for far too many.

An ever-evolving part of the everyday is also social media, whether a woman is in the virtual world with her real name, or using a fake account she has to hide from relatives, and whether she controls her income, or is beaten to give it to her family, and believes documenting her story⁸ online could be her last hope.

From our experiences offline, we know the language used to describe us. For example, we are like (un)wrapped candies⁹ for some people. We are also unprofessional if we refuse to be the woman notetaker¹⁰ every time. A lexicon of gendered slurs stored in our memories expands as we grow. But online, given women’s employment is a debate, what kind of language is used for describing this status and women associated with it?

Scanning contributions by users from various genders on three popular posts on Facebook about working women, over 300 comments, equivalent to more than 13,000 words (on a video¹¹ investigation on whether the public is okay with women’s employment or not, a post¹² on a local job-search group about what users think of women’s employment, and a post¹³ by a widely-followed author about the same topic), were collected and uploaded, and a visual textual network¹⁴ was developed from this material using the tool Infranodus.¹⁵

The collection of terms that appeared to stand out were considered as leads for text parts where conflict or arguments appeared to escalate. For example, terms like Wife, Husband, and Divorce, in addition to Child, Mother, Thing as well as God, Equality, and Idea were some of the most connected analytically to the topic of working women.

Next, I began grouping statements linked to the highlighted keywords (nodes) based on their content’s theme (thus achieving patterns), and finally, I manually reviewed the collected material all over again for additional coverage. The outcome was:

Women’s employment was being overwhelmingly spoken about as a manifestation of a “compromise” or a “downgrading”: a socioeconomically unstable, or religiously-shaken family will send its women to work because there’s a collective need for her to do so on a family-level, but the master narrative also goes on by concluding that the decision will inevitably lead to even bigger issues than these which triggered it in the first place within the family, impacting the whole of the society. Street children, jobless men, and moral decay are things working women being, at least partially, held responsible for.

There’s little evidence proving that women’s work, in the public eye and mouth, is believed to exist because she is a person with ambition, responsibilities or own needs (mind you under capitalism)- and this doesn’t have to be justified with children, parents, or anyone else’s human conditions. Why is it abnormal if it’s an individual decision or need (at least in the first place)? The answer partially lays in a crippling, toxic form of glorification of motherhood, promoting a set
of behaviors and mental modules in which the road to “martyrdom” begins with a little girl who’s being “prepared” to be a future bride, and later a selfless, unconditionally altruistic child-bearing wife.

Overall, there is certainly a lot more to the discussion on women and work in the Middle East. But while online conversations can be categorized for research or making-sense purposes, it is
impossible to do the same for the wide range of realities and experiences of women with (un)employment and financial (in)dependence, at least not without oversimplifying what
decades of armed conflicts, uneven distribution of wealth, inter-generational trauma, colonial heritage, and guardianship system byproducts did on a regional level to our everyday. How
much do we have to work before our everyday is our own?

An explorer of the intersectionality of media, tech, and culture, Diana Ishaqat currently works with civil society organizations in Jordan, campaigning for a participatory transition into digital learning in the Kingdom. She has previously presented and published her work in various countries including South Korea, the United States, and Denmark. A polyglot, Diana has recently received a Master's in Media, Campaigning, and Social Change from the University of Westminster in the United Kingdom.

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