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Women in Egypt Don’t Need to be Victimized

March 8, 2018
Egyptian women celebrate the news of the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak, who handed control of the country to the military, at night in Tahrir Square in downtown Cairo, Egypt Friday, February 11, 2011. Photo: Tara Todras-Whitehill, AP

International Women’s Day has been celebrated ever since the 1920s. It was originally for women to ask for political rights. Two days ago, I woke up to see that all my feeds were flooded with stories of successful women, and it made me think, how does this really reflect on me? We often see activists in the media saying that women all over the world are oppressed. We hear statistics about gaps in salaries based on gender, fewer employment opportunities for women, and it gets really ugly with statistics of sexual harassment. According to the world bank, the female labor force participation rate has dropped from 51.373 in 1990 to 48.673 in 2017. Egypt is often at the top of the list when it comes to such statistics. For the past few years, all I’ve been hearing from the media is, “brace yourself, you’ll be sexually harassed, oppressed and discriminated against when you graduate/study/do anything in life.” The country was ranked 136 out of 145 countries worldwide according to the 2015 Global Gender Gap Index, which measures disparities between men and women across countries The truth is, I haven’t really…


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