Manar Sallam (a pseudonym) has worked in journalism for 20 years, devoting herself to her work at a private newspaper out of love for the profession and out of financial need, as she shares with her husband the expenses of their family and three children.
She says that with the spread of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 and the announcement of the lockdown, she had to take unpaid leave to care for her children, aged between seven and 11, after all nurseries and childcare centres closed. She explains: “At first they were tolerant with us at the newspaper, giving us permission to work from home three days a week, and this continued for four months. But as soon as the lockdown ended, the newspaper’s officials announced that we had to return to working full-time from the newspaper’s offices, and that was where the problem began”.
The lifting of the lockdown announced by the government did not include nurseries and childcare centres, so Manar, 40, who lives in the Faisal district, one of the districts of Giza Governorate within the Greater Cairo region, had no choice but to request unpaid leave. “They allowed us to take leave when I told them I could not leave my children alone at home, especially since we were still in August and schools had not yet resumed”.
The ease with which the journalist obtained leave was not there when it ended and she returned to work, as the managing editor decided to move her to another section, away from the economy section she had specialised in since she started, because she had taken leave. She says: “I specialise in economics, so when the decision to transfer me was issued, I decided to discuss it with the managing editor, who told me it was a punishment for everyone who had taken leave, because they had not taken the newspaper’s circumstances into account and had not stood by it in the critical situation created by the pandemic. When I told her I had not wanted to take leave and that the reason was beyond my control, she did not care, and decided that I would not get any raise in my salary for a year”.
Manar had the courage to discuss the decision with the managing editor, despite knowing that she was not someone who accepts discussion, and told her that she could appreciate the circumstances she had gone through because she was a woman like her with two children, but she would not accept the conversation and accused her and others of laziness.
Manar goes on: “Although she is a woman with a family and close to me in age, she treated me very harshly. Now I am serving my punishment for two years in a section I know nothing about, after losing my sources and having my salary cut, and the reason is that I am a woman journalist with children”.
Head of Section, Suspended
Menna Saeed (a pseudonym) describes her passion for working in journalism and what she has endured since she started at the age of 17. The career of Saeed, 35, in journalism did not stop at hard work but reached the level of mastery, as she won several journalism awards from the Journalists’ Syndicate and others. But she stresses that this painstaking work and the awards did not count in her favour with her manager, who refused to nominate her for head of the investigations section simply because she is a married woman with children. She says sadly: “I have worked at a party newspaper for ten years, but that did not count in my favour with my manager, who was about to choose a section head to succeed her after she was promoted. She did not take into account the principle of seniority or hard work, and decided to choose a man to run the section”.
Sadness shows in Menna’s voice as she describes how she took on responsibility for the section, stood in for her manager and worked overtime repeatedly. “Once I was assigned to attend a meeting after working hours, which made me late picking up my son from nursery at night, and another time I took my son with me to my office at the newspaper so as not to disrupt work. But in the end my boss chose a male journalist who would not bother her by asking for leave, as she put it”.
She describes what happened as a step back in time: “What happened revealed that women’s oppression sometimes comes only from women like them, and I realised that the problem is in minds, not in regulations and laws”.
Denying Mothers the Right to Fair Pay
Samira Abdel Qader (a pseudonym), who has won several journalism awards and honours, never imagined that her situation in journalism would decline after pregnancy and childbirth, to the point that she now begs for her right to a pay rise, because she took maternity leave after giving birth. The irony is that the refusal came from her direct manager.
Samira has worked at that private newspaper for nearly 13 years. She was diligent and carried out her tasks accurately, even spending extra hours at work to show her seriousness, but that no longer counted in her favour after she took maternity leave, and she blames herself for having been born “a woman and a mother”.
She says: “After I gave birth to my daughter I took maternity leave, and my manager advised me not to take more than three months’ leave so it would not affect my career progress. After the leave ended and I returned to work, I was treated very badly”. Samira, 32, speaks painfully about her job situation: she has been treated like the trainees in treatment and pay, even though she was responsible for training them.
“I asked my manager to raise my salary to match the deteriorating economic conditions, especially since it is lower than the stipends of trainees who have been at the newspaper for only two years. She told me that my leave was the reason, that some women working at the newspaper in leadership positions had never taken leave, and that my request was rejected,” she says of her attempts to get a raise over a whole year.
Frustration took hold of Samira, leading her to refrain from asking for a promotion after 13 years at the newspaper and to settle for asking for a financial increase, knowing that a promotion request would not be accepted. She reveals an EGP 200 note, “assistance” given to her by the newspaper’s officials, and stresses that the response to her request for a raise was that small note, considered a handout for her: “I have not even thought of spending this handout because I felt insulted, and every day I go to work asking myself why I have to choose between my profession and my motherhood”.
Shortcomings in the Law
A research paper issued by the Egyptian Observatory for Journalism and Media in 2020, titled “The Double Burden: A Look at the Conditions of Working Mothers in Journalism”, reveals legal shortcomings in the texts of Egyptian law regarding working mother journalists on several points, most importantly guaranteeing a return to the same job position held before taking maternity leave, the absence of employment regulations in the workplace, the failure to establish nurseries within press institutions, the failure to grant maternity or childcare leave, and finally the inferior social view the mother journalist suffers from.
The research paper explained that one of the reasons for this shortcoming is that the legislator confined men and women to specific roles, making women’s main task caring for their families and children, while not clarifying the importance of men sharing this responsibility with women in childcare. This harms children’s interests and their right to a healthy life, burdens women with a double load at home and at work, and creates a gap between women and men in the workplace, while men are able to continue developing and advancing.
According to the research paper: “Although the law prevents the employer from dismissing a female worker during maternity leave, there is nothing that preserves the same position she held before the leave, and so the employer may use this to act arbitrarily against the worker”.
Among the shortcomings women journalists suffer from is the absence of childcare nurseries within institutions, despite a clear legal provision obliging owners of press institutions of all kinds to provide a nursery for the children of female employees if their number reaches 100 women journalists. But this is not applied, which leads some of them to leave the profession.
The Women’s Committee at the Journalists’ Syndicate
“We have not received any complaints from working women journalists, and if we had, we would have acted immediately,” says Doaa El-Naggar, a member of the Journalists’ Syndicate council and rapporteur of the Women’s Committee, speaking to Zawia3, stressing that since it was established three years ago the committee has not received any complaints indicating that a woman journalist had been excluded and sidelined after pregnancy and childbirth. She adds: “We consider such complaints individual cases that cannot be generalised”.
El-Naggar explained that one of the most important tasks of the Journalists’ Syndicate’s Women’s Committee is providing union, legal and moral support to women journalist colleagues in the problems and issues they face related to practising journalism, especially in cases of psychological or physical violence or gender-based discrimination, as well as protecting complainants and concealing their identities if they wish. She adds: “We call on any woman journalist with a complaint of this kind to come forward immediately, and all her data will be kept confidential”.
She pointed out that the labour law and the Egyptian constitution affirm equality among citizens without discrimination on the basis of sex, so there is no discrimination between men and women in the right to work. She explained: “There are provisions in labour laws that facilitate women’s work and provide them with the means to help them reconcile their duties towards the family and their professional or job activity, along with raising their awareness of their rights, such as guaranteeing their right to pay and to continue in their jobs without being suddenly dismissed or laid off. Anything other than that is a violation of the law requiring them to submit an official complaint so that the Women’s Committee can take the legal and union paths and procedures to restore their stolen rights”.
El-Naggar added: “In Egypt, the rights of working mothers were distributed between the laws on civil servants and the labour law, in addition to International Labour Organization conventions focusing on the rights of working women and their equality with men in pay for work of equal value, and in opportunities and treatment for workers of both sexes with family responsibilities”.
Head of the Journalists’ Syndicate: A Great Injustice
“A great injustice.” This is how the head of the Journalists’ Syndicate, Khaled El-Balshy, described the marginalisation and exclusion women journalists face after pregnancy and childbirth, adding: “It would be a great injustice to view in isolation the behaviour of a woman who holds a leadership position in journalism and decides to use the weapon of discrimination, exclusion and marginalisation against a colleague who became pregnant and gave birth. In the end, these women leaders are a product of the society we live in; they were raised and grew up on its unwritten rules and ideas, which are based on privileging men over women and belittling women and their rights. There is even a prevailing culture at work that if a woman gives birth she becomes a burden on the institution she works for, because her effort will gradually diminish due to her family responsibilities, and some develop these ideas from a religious perspective”.
He added: “Unfortunately, it is a social behaviour, not a specific behaviour confined to journalism”, stressing that society does indeed have a crisis in dealing with women, as some still confine women to their feminine role only, not seeing that they have rights they can demand, and there is a group in society with a negative attitude towards the word woman in general, while some treat her as a second-class citizen.
El-Balshy stresses that eliminating the discrimination and exclusion some women journalists face in their institutions starts with several steps, the first being that individuals in society, whether male or female, must be raised on the idea of equality in rights and duties, away from a culture of gender-based discrimination. He adds: “Change begins in the family, and according to Egyptian law we are all citizens equal in rights and duties”.
He considered the next step to be spreading the idea of resisting gender-based discrimination among all classes of Egyptian society until it takes root and becomes part of its make-up, stressing that this requires great effort and a long time. He pointed out that the third step is updating the work culture in the state regarding awareness of women’s rights, including in the journalistic community, through binding legal rules, codes of conduct and legal regulations affirming that all those working in the field have the same rights and the same duties regardless of gender.
Fighting Femininity to Get Promoted
Journalist Fatma Khair, who has worked as a media adviser to associations specialising in women’s rights and to international media institutions, criticised, speaking to Zawia3, the exclusion and marginalisation that some women journalists who have been through pregnancy and childbirth face at the hands of female colleagues in leadership positions. She says: “Some women who hold senior management positions believe that giving up everything associated with being women is the way to rise in their jobs and advance professionally. Their collision with the obstacles placed in their path because they are women made them take a stance hostile to their own gender, deciding to give up everything associated with them as women, believing that this will protect them from harm”.
She goes on: “When this kind of woman becomes a manager, she decides that all women wishing to follow the path of professionalism must imitate her, and she does not accept the different choices of women who have decided to keep a balance in their lives between work and personal life, looking down on them, believing with certainty that they will surely fail and do not deserve to rise vertically in the field of work”. She warns of the danger this type of woman poses in not supporting her peers and confiscating other women’s right to choose, adding: “This type of manager reminds me of what women resorted to when women first entered the labour market in the modern era, at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, when some had to imitate men to gain society’s respect! But what is the point of that now, after all the victories women have achieved globally?”
Khair pointed out that the solution is to spread awareness among women of women’s right to a fair working environment, and to make genuine, serious efforts to select well-qualified women cadres for decision-making positions in the journalism industry to express women’s problems, dreams and aspirations, concluding: “Women who do not believe in women’s right to a fair working environment will never help legislate laws that support women, and their voice may be a tool for injustice against women if they are the voice of women in decision-making positions”.
