9 Coptic Women Who Run the World

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It may or may not come as a surprise to some people to find out that Egypt ranks in the bottom ten worldwide in gender equity. This means that, culturally, Egyptian women have “significantly lower participation in the labor force, lower literacy rates,” and suffer from high rates of domestic and sexual violence. Here in America, Egyptian women are much less likely to face as much gender inequality. However, vestiges of that sexism still haunt us; women can be overlooked, forgotten, or dismissed.

Sometimes, this overlooking can be subtle and unintentional. For example, the Los Angeles Diocese held a “Coptic Leadership” event that had a panel of three leaders. While I was at first excited to hear about the event and loved all the speakers, I couldn’t help but notice that all the speakers were male, and I wondered why there where no women on the panel.

I reached out to the organizer to ask about the lack of women being represented in our community, but I did not get a satisfying response.

While the coordinators likely didn’t mean any ill will when they neglected to add at least one woman to the leadership panel, it represents a pattern of subconscious bias present in our culture. Having strong female leaders serving as role models is crucial to the advancement of our society. That being said, those female leaders should be made known, especially to the youth. So here are 9 examples of Coptic women exemplifying truly amazing leadership- not only in the church, but in the world as well.

Suzie Abdou

Suzie Abdou is a policy analyst and international development specialist with experience in democracy, governance, and gender in the Middle East and North Africa. In addition to being a regular contributor to NPR, Huffington Post, and other online and news television programs, Suzie has also led a service mission to the refugee camps in Greece, Serbia, and France. Suzie is a Security Fellow with the Truman National Security Project and their Los Angeles chapter Co-Director, a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy, and she was a 2017 Franklin Fellow with the U.S. Department of State — Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs.