Qatar tops MENA region in female literacy rate

Qatar is the only country in the MENA region where female adult literacy is higher than male adult literacy, which confirms the vital role women have come to play in nation building, says Qatari writer and Faculty Member of Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar, Dr Amal Mohammed al Malki. Excerpts:

Q: How would you assess the present status of Arab women?

A: Arab women have achieved some critical rights, such as a more equal personal status code for women in Morocco, the right to divorce in Egypt, the right to vote and run in elections in Oman, Bahrain and Kuwait over the last decade or so.

However, there is so much more to be done. Women are still caught between politics and culture.

There is the need to institutionalise their rights to ensure they are not left to be hijacked by political factions or outdated traditions.

How would you rate the role of Qatari women in the process of nation building?

Qatari women are a central resource in Qatar’s strategy of national development.

According to World Bank statistics on women and development in the Middle East, Qatar is a leader in women’s advancement in the MENA region. Qatar closed the malefemale secondary school enrollment gap back in 1980, much, much before any other MENA country.

UNESCO figures for 2000 put Qatar as one of the only six MENA countries (along with the UAE, Kuwait, Lebanon, Bahrain, and Jordan) where adult female literacy is over 80 percent. It is the only country in MENA where female adult literacy surpasses male adult literacy.

Among the school-age population, Qatar stands third in the ratio of female to male literacy, second only to Palestine and Saudi Arabia. More than any other MENA country, Qatar has encouraged women to continue their education after high school, with three Qatari women attending a post-secondary college or university for every male who does so. Qatari women study the humanities, arts, and education at the tertiary level by a ratio of 9:1 over men, suggesting that Qatar, already and will for decades to come, rely primarily on experts drawn from its female population to design and implement its core educational strategies.

What are the stages of development Arab women have passed through in the past one to two decades?

Arab women’s recent development has been mainly tied to politics and economy, and thus we see that women in stable economies and political atmospheres have been granted more freedom and equality, especially in terms of education and employment.

The two main global agreements in recent history that have benefited Arab women are the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), a universal “bill of rights” for women that requires all signatories to abolish all laws that are inconsistent with women’s equality with men and the Fourth World Conference on Women, better known as the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (Beijing Declaration 1995).

What has been the impact of Arab Spring on Women in the Arab world?

Nothing that is positive so far. On the contrary actually, women rights are further jeopardised due to change of political ideologies and women themselves are the first victims of any political unrest, so until the Arab Spring settles down and we see its results on women’s struggle for equality, I’m afraid any claim of it having positive impact on women is just hypocrisy.

However, I would like to reverse the question and talk about the impact of women on the Arab Spring.

Women have proved that they are in fact equal citizens with political consciousness and can be major players in the political scenes.

Men and women stood side by side in every venue calling for freedom and political reform. They talked to the world east and west and utilised traditional media as well as new media.

They proved to the world and their own societies that they aren’t passive and that they have voices which they used in all languages.

Why is it that you are the only Qatari faculty member of the Education City?

It happened that I had the right qualifications and wouldn’t take “no” for an answer. The moment I knew what I wanted and that is to teach in Education City, I was determined to achieve my aim.

I believe nothing is impossible and you can overcome any obstacle with determination and hard work. To teach in a branch campus here in Qatar, I had to go through the main campus, which meant that I had to teach in Carnegie Mellon- Pittsburgh before teaching here. It was one of the most fulfilling experiences that shaped who I am today.

Do you think that Qatari women are unwilling to take up such responsibilities?

I believe in the will and power of Qatari women and I believe that many will follow in my footsteps.

What kind of role do you foresee for the Qatari woman by 2030?

I see her working as a partner and a leader. She will be the wife and mother, student, educator, manager, minister, politician, economist, pilot, athletic, and many more. She will demand the respect of the world and will break all stereotypes about her.

(Source: Qatar Tribune)

Children of the Hyphens, the Next Generation

After writing an article on how women should be allowed to retain their original surname after the wedding, a friend suggested me to read an article published on The New York Times. I found it interesting. Maybe it’s a new concept in India, but in the West, it’s quite often that children get both the surnames, surname of the father and the mother. Here’s the article, written by Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow.

WHEN my parents married in 1977, women’s liberation was in full swing and my mother was a consciousness-raiser. She was about as likely to take my father’s name as she was to sport a veil at the wedding. She would remain Ms. Tuhus. Nine months later, the surname for their new baby (me) was self-evident. My parents yoked their names into a new one: Tuhus-Dubrow.

“I knew that was the best I could do,” my father told me. “As opposed to just Tuhus.”

Other parents, albeit a small minority, had the same idea. By the mid-1970s more women were keeping their maiden names, so hyphenating the names of the children seemed like the next logical raspberry to blow at the patriarchy, a stand against the family’s historical swallowing up of women’s identity.

Hyphenation has other pluses. The invented names are distinctive; I’ve never come across a Tuhus-Dubrow outside my immediate family. The inconveniences — blank stares, egregious misspellings — are outweighed by the blessing of never having to worry about a Google doppelgänger.

The problem, of course, is that this naming practice is unsustainable. (Growing up, I constantly fielded the question, “What will you do if you marry someone else with two last names? Will your kids have four names?”) Like many of the baby boomers’ utopian impulses, it eventually had to run up against practical constraints.

I don’t have children yet, but plenty of others in my cohort — the first in which nontrivial numbers were born hyphenated — do. And reproducing while hyphenated brings inevitable quandaries. I was curious to see how my peers have handled them. So I asked around. What I found was a whole gamut of solutions. The name-blending pioneers now have grandchildren whose names embody an intriguing mix of the traditional and the maverick.

I encountered several women who kept their own hyphenated names when they married, but gave their children the father’s surname. This scenario seems to deviate the least from the mainstream: after all, many other women with single surnames do the same.

Zoe Segal-Reichlin, 33, a lawyer for Planned Parenthood in New York, was typical in her approach to naming her son, now 10 months old. She said she flirted with alternatives: hyphenating three names, picking either Segal or Reichlin to link with her husband’s name. But ultimately, none felt quite right, and going with the father’s name won out as the most practical choice.

“It was the best of bad options,” she told me.

Same-sex couples face their own quandaries, since there is no tradition to follow. Cora Jeyadame (née Stubbs-Dame), 37, a first-grade teacher in Newton, Mass., was determined to share a name with her child, and to think ahead more than her own parents had.

“It’s a one-generation solution,” she said of hyphenation. She and her wife, whose surname was Jeyapalan, spliced their names together into an entirely new, hyphenless amalgam.

How did they decide on the name? “I actually put it out on Facebook,” she said: “ ‘I challenge you to come up with good combinations.’ ” The winning entry, Jeyadame, is the legal surname of Cora and her 4-month-old; her wife uses it socially.

Naming decisions raise novel questions for hyphenated men. There is little precedent of husbands changing their names at marriage or giving up the prerogative to pass their names on. Traditional practices grew out of a male-dominated culture and a need for simple rules. But there is another, less obvious motive: to hold men accountable for their offspring.

“How do you attach men to children?” said Laurie K. Scheuble, a senior lecturer at Pennsylvania State University who has done several studies on naming practices. Names are “a very functional and practical way” to do so.

But perhaps, in an age when men wear BabyBjorns, it is no longer always necessary. When Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, 32, an English professor who lives in Portland, Ore., married Laura Rosenbaum, he toyed with the idea of a creative synthesis.

But “Rosenpollackpelznerbaum sounded like a weapon of mass destruction,” he said. When they had a son, giving him Daniel’s last name seemed too complicated, so they gave the baby Laura’s.

Mr. Pollack-Pelzner initially worried that having a different name would arouse suspicions, leading to airport frisks and other indignities. But since his son was born, “I’ve hardly thought about it at all.” No one has ever challenged whether he is the toddler’s father: “The poor guy is cursed to look just like me.”

Nathan Lamarre-Vincent and his wife, Sarah Miller, went the opposite direction, giving their children Nathan’s hyphenated name. Mr. Lamarre-Vincent, a 34-year-old Harvard postdoctoral fellow in molecular biology, said it was a default decision: “We were both kind of go-with-the-flow,” he said, and simply hewed to tradition.

The irony is that the name is the product of his own parents’ defiance of that tradition. It is a little like following every step of an old-school Thanksgiving recipe, but starting out with a Tofurky.

In a 2002 paper, Ms. Scheuble and her husband, David R. Johnson, a Penn State professor, predicted that the importance of a family name could begin to decline. Thanks to more divorce, remarriage, same-sex unions and retention of maiden names, it is far from unusual for members of the same nuclear family to bear different surnames.

Nevertheless, the vast majority of families stick with custom. According to a 2009 study analyzing data from 2004, only 6 percent of native-born American married women had unconventional surnames (meaning they kept their birth names, hyphenated with their husbands’ names, or pulled a Hillary Rodham Clinton).

I know lots of women, including myself, who kept their birth names at marriage. But according to my anecdotal observations, which others seconded, rates of hyphenation seem to have fallen since my brother and I were born.

As Ms. Segal-Reichlin said, “At the time I think they thought they were going to be the wave of the future,” but it has not panned out that way. Still, hyphenated names are not entirely a relic of the ’70s, like sideburns and lava lamps: witness the Jolie-Pitts.

Based on my conversations, the verdict on hyphenation was mixed.

“When I was young I hated it,” said Sarah Schindler-Williams, a 32-year-old lawyer in Philadelphia. “It was long, it never fit in anything. I was always Sarah Schindler-Willi.”

But most, including Ms. Schindler-Williams, eventually grew to appreciate their cumbersome monikers. Names frequently convey information about their bearers: Weinberg or O’Malley gives you a hint about the person attached to it. But conjoined names, several people mentioned, also say something extra about your parents’ egalitarian values. (Unless you are British; then it means you’re posh.)

The irony is that the name is the product of his own parents’ defiance of that tradition. It is a little like following every step of an old-school Thanksgiving recipe, but starting out with a Tofurky.

In a 2002 paper, Ms. Scheuble and her husband, David R. Johnson, a Penn State professor, predicted that the importance of a family name could begin to decline. Thanks to more divorce, remarriage, same-sex unions and retention of maiden names, it is far from unusual for members of the same nuclear family to bear different surnames.

Nevertheless, the vast majority of families stick with custom. According to a 2009 study analyzing data from 2004, only 6 percent of native-born American married women had unconventional surnames (meaning they kept their birth names, hyphenated with their husbands’ names, or pulled a Hillary Rodham Clinton).

I know lots of women, including myself, who kept their birth names at marriage. But according to my anecdotal observations, which others seconded, rates of hyphenation seem to have fallen since my brother and I were born.

As Ms. Segal-Reichlin said, “At the time I think they thought they were going to be the wave of the future,” but it has not panned out that way. Still, hyphenated names are not entirely a relic of the ’70s, like sideburns and lava lamps: witness the Jolie-Pitts.

Based on my conversations, the verdict on hyphenation was mixed.

“When I was young I hated it,” said Sarah Schindler-Williams, a 32-year-old lawyer in Philadelphia. “It was long, it never fit in anything. I was always Sarah Schindler-Willi.”

But most, including Ms. Schindler-Williams, eventually grew to appreciate their cumbersome monikers. Names frequently convey information about their bearers: Weinberg or O’Malley gives you a hint about the person attached to it. But conjoined names, several people mentioned, also say something extra about your parents’ egalitarian values. (Unless you are British; then it means you’re posh.)