The “Dark Spot”
Co-founder of Womena, Elissa Freiha illustrates the role and power that Arab female entrepreneurs can have, stating that when “given the right platform, these women can become the business owners and leaders for the future of the region”. Based in Dubai, Womena is an investing platform that is focused on promoting gender diversity and inclusion, specifically in the tech field. The article by Kelly Ommundsen and Khaled Kteily, while including discussing the role of Arab women and referring particularly to Freiha’s role in helping provide a platform to them, also addresses the unique “dark spot” dealt with by Arab females. They discuss the role of the internet in helping Arab female entrepreneurs find creative new means by which to overcome barriers and fight “societal pressure on women to stay at home, a digital gender gap and structural disadvantages in fundraising and investments”. In such a case the “dark spot” that Arab female entrepreneurs face ranges across both a cultural and a structural basis. Culturally, Arab females are expected to stay at home and structurally, they are faced with a lot more difficulties when in search for job opportunities and exposure in the business world.
That which was imposed on Arab women culturally has translated into the workplace treatment and opportunities available for them. We recognize as such that these labels and ideologies that we come to associate ourselves with are actually the ripple effect of the labels that were originally created and subjected upon us by society. Messages, images and ideas perpetuated by the media are so frequently publicized to people and illustrated to them, that they become conditioned into believing them and eventually taking them on as their own set of beliefs.
Labels as such become major players in the degradation of women’s self-confidence around the world. Brenda Major, a social psychologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara has been heavily involved in researching this phenomenon. She set up tests where she would ask “men and women how they thought they were going to do on a variety of tasks”. While men “consistently overestimated their abilities and subsequent performance…women underestimated both”. Alongside having come to this conclusion, Major has even gone so far to state that is it “one of the most consistent findings you can have”. This goes to prove the extent to which labels can influence a persona and farther than that, the extent to which they have become entrenched in the psyche of women all over the world, debilitating their self-confidence and thereby, their ability to achieve acquire certain benefits as those often so easily handed off to their gender counterpart: men.
This is an excerpt from my book, Unveiled: Through the Eyes of an Arab Woman which is not just about Arab women, but about all women who represent something much more than ethnicity.
Want to help re-write the narrative? Email me at fa402@georgetown.edu or connect with me on LinkedIn. Also, you can find my book Unveiled: Through the Eyes of an Arab Woman on Amazon — here is the link to buy it: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07KMFXTG1
