Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Hello and welcome to Women of the Middle east podcast. Women of the Middle East.
This podcast relates the realities of Arab women and their rich and diverse experiences. It aims to present the multiplicity of their voices and wishes to break overdue cultural stereotypes about women of the Middle East. My name is Amel Malki. I'm a feminist scholar and educator. This is Women of the Middle east podcast.
[00:00:30] Speaker B: We come back with a new season, season seven, with weekly episodes discussing topics pertaining to women from the MENA region. Yet commonalities can be always drawn as the vast of women experiences are shared across cultures, countries and generations. We delve into multiple themes through touching on different experiences and views of women we wish to educate and empower. Some of our topics may make some uncomfortable and that is what we intend to do.
If talking about gender based violence and sexism in academia or women's sexual and reproductive health make you feel uncomfortable, please embrace that feeling and respect it and hope this makes you continue listening to us. You may discover that you misunderstood what we as feminists are all about. Maybe this will lead you to question other areas of your life that you dismissed based on hearsay or what others made you believe. You may discover that we're not so different and that we want the same things in life for us, for our families and for our communities. Freedom, equality, safety and peace for all. So we begin season seven with discussing over the next three episodes, sexism and academia as a form of gender based violence and its ramifications. My first guest is Dr. Mahasaid who has founded the first Anti Harassment and violence against women unit in Cairo University, a model that is now being replicated and 14 Egyptian universities.
[00:02:17] Speaker C: Dr. Mahasayd, it's lovely to have you on Women of the Middle east podcast.
[00:02:22] Speaker D: Thank you very much, Dr. Amal. It's really my pleasure. It's my pleasure to be here. I'm thrilled to be with you. Thank you so much.
[00:02:29] Speaker C: Thank you. Same here. You're an academic, you're a researcher, you're a scholar, you're the chair of the English department at Cairo University. You have multiple publications, you've written about women, about gender, the impact of new technologies on literature and much more. More. How do you define yourself as an academic?
[00:02:48] Speaker D: When I was reading about you, Dr. Amal, and you and you said an academic and activist. And then I thought, oh, that's exactly why I have quite a long story. It's actually as an academic, I started off doing poetry, studying poetry and British poetry and so on. And then eventually as I, as I got more into Academia. I got very interested in Arab American writing. Nobody knew. And that was way before 9 11, of course, much earlier than 9 11. So I started getting interested in Arab American writing. That was my PhD. And I remember very well, people said, you're going to be talking about Gibran. And I said, no, there is a new generation of Arab Americans. Nobody really knew about them. I started working with Arab Americans and the identity of Arab Americans. And then I got political.
So I started getting political. I started getting engaged politically with all of the Arab cause and the Arab Americans and the discrimination and the stereotyping and all of that. You become political and you're a woman. You cannot avoid feminism and you cannot avoid working with feminist issues and feminist causes and so on. So that led me further into feminism and so on. A third thing, technology. I was fascinated by technology, fascinated. But what really got me and got me hooked was violence against women. I got very involved in violence against women. I founded the Anti Harassment unit at Cairo University, which was the first of its kind, and so on. And then I started doing a lot of research in that area and I started publishing a lot in that area as well. I will tell you that I have just finished a groundbreaking research about digital violence. It's not published yet. It's going to be published by the end of the month, inshallah. And it's being reviewed now. And I did this with a Yemeni colleague. We've developed a barometer that would measure the vulnerability of women. Defender organizations to digital violence. Develop this based on a few vulnerability and impact indicators. Any organization could actually check their vulnerability out, how fragile they are towards digital violence. It's with an organization in Canada called SecDev that works in.
In security, in digital security.
[00:05:31] Speaker C: Cyber feminism proves to be as valid and as strong as any form of feminism. And, and thus the violence against feminists.
[00:05:41] Speaker D: Do take a digital form all the time. Digital violence is. Is so severe. It's so severe and it's. And its main aim is to silence women. During that research, I discovered so many things. I discovered that there are groups, specific groups that punish women that are there to punish women.
If they speak about any provocative issue, they are there to punish them and discipline them and they would defame them. And one of them is called the Sif al Maslow, for example.
[00:06:15] Speaker C: Are they state or are those like independent groups?
[00:06:20] Speaker D: They're just basically misogynistic groups to correct and discipline and punish women.
Since the MeToo movement, I think that what we call the fourth or the fifth wave of feminism has started which is cyber feminism, of course. And it was a lot of opportunities, but because it opened up the public space for women to exist and be there.
However, there's no restrictions. I was writing a paper the other day called the Confiscation of Our Thoughts. It's a means to confiscate our thoughts because, again, perpetrators are very safe because they have fake accounts. They can easily intrude onto your privacy. And so on. What we found in that research that I was just telling you about, the more outreach you have, the more vulnerable you are.
The more impact you have, the more vulnerable you are.
[00:07:16] Speaker B: Each country has its own cyber laws.
[00:07:19] Speaker C: That supposedly protect all citizens and residents.
[00:07:24] Speaker D: During that research, when I asked about the laws and the regulations, we spoke to many feminists and feminist organizations and so on. The thing that they all agreed about is women are not a priority. They go to the law. They do go to the law. There is a law, the report, but they're not a priority.
[00:07:45] Speaker C: I'm not surprised. This exists everywhere. You founded the Anti Harassment and Violence Against Women Unit, and it was one of a kind. It was the first.
What made you take this step? Was it a personal quest or was it more of a professional? Given the fact that you're an activist, you're a feminist.
[00:08:05] Speaker D: Okay, can I say, can I be very frank? It was mere chance. The time was right. It was right after the Arab Spring and the revolution and all of that.
And during that time, I was doing. I was working with the children and the children institutions and I was. We were talking about their policies and stuff. And then somebody I know went onto campus and was cat called upon. She was harassed on campus.
So she asked me, said, you're working with our policies, you're helping us develop policies. Do you have, don't you have an anti harassment policy at Cairo University?
They said, zach, no, we don't. I'm sorry, but we don't. They said, so what do you do? And they said, we don't do anything.
Does it happen? It doesn't even happen. And that's one of the biggest issues that we have. There is this denial of the existence of harassment. This denial is one of the main reasons it expands and goes on and on. It doesn't happen. I went to Huda, Sad. And I went to a few other colleagues and said, like, why don't we develop a policy for sexual harassment? We got involved with NGOs. Yeah, there were a few NGOs that were working with sexual harassment and so on. So we invited them and we started. I remember we started having meetings at Women in Memory Forum to actually develop a policy.
And we developed a policy and then we have a policy. We want to give it back to the president of the university. Huda was then Huda Sada knew the president well because they were together on the Constitutional Committee.
Geber Nassar then was the president. We went to him and said, we have a policy. He was a little reluctant. I have to say. What happens with, especially with harassment and with women issues is something big happens. So you get everybody's attention and everybody starts working. A blonde girl walked on campus and was followed by hundreds of male students. This would have been okay.
The bad luck is there was some media around and got that on media. Cairo University was in a terrible situation. We said, we have the answer.
[00:10:35] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:10:37] Speaker D: We went to him with the answer and he said, if you have a policy with no unit, it's going to be put in the drawer and nobody's going to look at it. We have to have a force behind it. And that's how it came about.
[00:10:51] Speaker C: And it entails more than, of course, a policy. It entails training as well. So do you do training for men and women?
[00:10:57] Speaker D: We used to do a lot. We used to do training. We did training, different kinds of trainings.
What was really important was doing awareness raising.
People are ignorant about what is sexual harassment. They don't know it.
[00:11:13] Speaker B: True.
[00:11:14] Speaker D: Whether men or women, the two, like women would not believe that this is really sexual harassment.
[00:11:21] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:11:21] Speaker D: They would always blame themselves and think that I must have said something wrong and so on. That's the women. And on the other hand, the men, like somebody would say, they're just. We're just giving them a compliment or it's just a compliment. It's that we're just trying to be nice and so on and so forth. So the raising of awareness towards what is sexual harassment was important. We also had to put in a reporting mechanism because if we don't have a reporting mechanism, then it is useless. We had a large body of students working with us. So we were training those students, did a lot of bystander training. Like, what do you do if you see sexual harassment? Another very important training was for the security guards, because they're our interface. They're there. And the training was not only what, sexual harassment, but if somebody's harassed, what you do, what's the tone of your voice, you don't touch her, all of those things. And we actually develop a poster for them to have them in their offices. We're a very big university, like we have 25 schools. We have over 300,000 students. We also appointed what we call facilitators in each of the schools. And we trained them.
This was a third kind of training that we trained them to be like a mini unit at their schools.
[00:12:51] Speaker C: It's very interesting what you said, that awareness was key because some women didn't know what harassment is, and some men definitely thought that this is a cultural thing. When we see something nice, whether it's your blouse or your hair or whatever. But one of the things that shocked many of US during the MeToo movement was all of those stories that came to the. To the surface, and many of us just suddenly realized, oh, boy, that was harassment.
So we all know harassment in a.
[00:13:26] Speaker D: Way, or every single one of us.
Exactly.
[00:13:31] Speaker C: Now, sexism manifests in various ways, right? And of course, it creates hostile environments and limiting opportunities for women in specific contexts. While physical harassment exists, of course, not all harassment as physically, as overtly clear as the physical sexual harassment. So what is the contextualized definition here of harassment? Does it have to be really sexual? Or what is harassment in an academic setting?
[00:14:04] Speaker D: Let's start by saying that people believe that there is no sexual harassment in academia at all. But there is a lot of research, a lot of research. We are not allowed to do this kind of research. We do very little research on that. But there is. There is a lot of research on sexual harassment in academia, because academia is a place where there is an absolute power relationship.
There are power dynamics, and harassment is based on the whole idea of a power relation. I am stronger than you are. As I used to say, professors think that their God, especially the older ones. I have to say it's much, much better now because many people are talking about it and so on, but especially the older professors think that they're God's gift to mankind.
And if they pat you on the shoulder or put their hand on your knee, they're doing you a favor, blessing you somehow. Yeah, you're getting the blessing. And they know very well that you wouldn't be able to open your mouth. This is very important because all of sexual harassment, all of harassment, all of abuse, is actually based on the power dynamic. The whole idea of the patriarchal, strong person who can do whatever they can. I always give the example of a story I heard. There was this woman walking down the street, and the boy, who's 11 years old, slapped her on the bottom. And why? It is not sexual. It's all about power.
[00:15:51] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:15:52] Speaker D: And so she was very angry, and she went and she ran towards him and his mother was there. And she told her, his mother, your son is impolite. He did this and that. And her. And the mother said, oh, my God, you've grown up and become a man. So it's basically an act of power. They once, they asked Edward said, they asked him about the US Why is the US doing all of this? And he said, because it can.
And why are men harassing women? Because they can. Because they can. It has been accepted, it has been celebrated, in fact, as a natural thing, a manly thing, that you are actually sexually harassing a woman. But sexual harassment is not only physical, as we were just saying. There is verbal, there is mental, there is the intimidation. And the most elusive sexual harassment is by looking. A man can look at a woman and make her fear that she's being stripped. What is she going to report?
And this is a question that I have not been able to answer yet. I got once a report saying, talking about a professor, a very prominent professor who actually looks at one of his students in a way that makes her feel totally uncomfortable. She says, I feel naked in front of him. To be able to complain, you need to have evidence.
[00:17:32] Speaker C: Evidence?
[00:17:33] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:17:33] Speaker D: What evidence? What evidence is she going to give?
[00:17:36] Speaker C: Even if you feel that you have been violated and harassed, you cannot report it because the culture around you doesn't see what I've been belittled. The woman in you. You're a bit emotional. Those phrases, microaggressions. And sometimes it could lead to intimidation. Sometimes it could lead really to depression. Aren't those forms of harassment after all?
[00:18:03] Speaker D: Of course they are. Okay. There is a paper that I've written where I say that it's the microaggressions which we face daily. We face microaggressions daily on all levels. There is this, what they call the pyramid of violence. And it all starts with microaggression. And then it moves up to homicide like the other the two girls that were murdered. Because we accept the microaggressions, it becomes normalized. It becomes a normal practice. It's okay.
Then it gets severely like sexual harassment and abuse. And it's okay. It's tolerated. And so it starts escalating, escalating till the very end. I'm sure you've heard about Nayera, the girl, the student that was murdered by her boyfriend here. There was a whole movement against Nayera, saying that she led him on, she is the reason why did she break up with him? She should have married him.
She deserves to be killed.
So when you Have a society or a culture that actually allows and tolerates these kinds of aggressions, it's going to go on forever. How do you stop them and you don't stop them by law, we have an anti harassment law where we have to get evidence, we have, we have to have witnesses, and still it's not going to. It cannot stop the microaggressions that we face daily in our daily life.
[00:19:30] Speaker C: How does harassment differ between students and woman academics? So, for example, as a woman academic, she could be denied a promotion. She could be let go of an administrative position that she holds because of her activism. Let's say she could be stopped from teaching or doing research on certain topics.
Have you seen that? And are those valid excuses to report harassment against the superior? Would the legal system acknowledge those things also as harassment?
[00:20:06] Speaker D: No, they wouldn't.
I don't know much about other places, but I can speak a lot about Egypt. Academia is seen as gender blind. And it's very true. It's gender blind. It is gender blind. It is not gender sensitive and is not gender responsive. It's gender blind. I remember just before I left the sexual harassment unit, the president then was saying, like, academia is an equal opportunity space. In academia specifically, it all depends on your research.
If you do research, if there is an outlet of research, then you are going to achieve whatever you want. So academia cannot be considered like any other place, because academia depends on your own research.
[00:20:57] Speaker C: This is what we hear everywhere.
[00:20:59] Speaker D: There was a research that was conducted in 2021 on women academics in leadership positions.
Okay, we don't have a single. We don't have a single woman as a university president. There was only one woman that was, I think, 2009 head of Alexandria University. She was the president of Alexandria University and she did not stay longer. 2009, 2011, the revolution she was out. A quote that stopped me by one of the participants is that she said, they systematically kill our ambition. And that's true.
There is nothing spoken, there is nothing regulated, but they systematically kill the ambition. They systematically do that. And because they think that academia is gender blind. In that same study, she asked a few women and they said that they would not actually like to become in presidential places in the. And when she asked them why, she said that they become like a third sex.
They don't fit in the men's club and they have been pushed up from the, like the professors, colleagues, women colleagues. So they become totally isolated, so they cannot really perform. And these are things that. Who are you going to report to? What are you Going to report.
[00:22:39] Speaker C: I've been in contacts where I've seen women being, as you said, they do reach a point where they had to fight for everything. For a promotion, for teaching, for organizing a conference, for creating a community outreach program. I've seen that. I've seen what women care about in academia belittled on daily basis. That they've killed their passion. Killed it.
[00:23:09] Speaker D: Absolutely. Of course, the distribution of faculty. So in general, we have, when we look at Al Mutter, the assistants, the fresh graduates, we have 66% women and 34% men.
And then they finish their masters or whatever and they become Mudaris, Mossad.
The number starts decreasing. 59% women and 41% men. And then they become a lecturer. 50, 50.
Until they become a professor. And it's only 36% women who become professors. Yeah, it's amazing. It's scary.
[00:23:58] Speaker C: It is, right?
[00:24:00] Speaker D: It's scale. So when I told them that was in team, actually, I don't know what's happening now because they've removed this dashboard. It gives us too much information.
So when I asked about. When I said, but don't you think there's a problem? Don't you think there is some? We are losing a lot of talent. What is happening?
And they said, oh, they get married and get children, of course.
And I said, no, it's not about getting married and getting children. It's much more than this.
We need to analyze this. We need to look at this much closer. Of course, at the English department, we're 99.9% women.
We don't have issues. But looking at the decrease of numbers, looking at the difference, like looking at how there are fields that women are not allowed in, women are not allowed in. There is no regulation that says women shouldn't be there. And if they're there, they're pun. When I was doing the anti harassment unit, we had a heartbreaking story. A student in the faculty of medicine faced an attempt of rape during her internship in surgery. Because surgery is a man's world. Women do not enter this department to punish her. There was an attempt at the rape and the horrific stories. There are whole departments that do not have women because of this. We lose so much talent. There is so much talent. And it's the traditional gender relationship that's outside of the academia is just extended into the academia. It's the typical exercise of power and authority and it reproduces those patriarchal patterns of political authority over and over and over again that's being produced and reproduced every day.
[00:26:16] Speaker C: If that's the case, then we have to really deconstruct this image of academia as being the ivory tower, as being the place where everyone is equal, men and women, and as if it's the land of opportunity. Because definitely it's not. If it's in terms of representation, protection, all of that, it is not. And people need to understand academia is just like any other place where, as you said, what happens out there is reflected in there.
[00:26:46] Speaker D: Absolutely. Absolutely. And even worse. And I have to say, it's even worse. It's even worse on two fronts. The front, number one is because of this, we lose so much talent.
So much talent. That's number one. Number two is it is not seen. It is hidden in the ivory tower. It's hidden in the ivory tower, the utopia, the very distinguished people that are there that do not discriminate. We need to have gender responsive policies.
We cannot have gender blind policies. We need to have gender that reflect on understanding the realities of our lives. We're supposed to finish our masters in maximum five years. However, if I have a baby, I get an extra two years. An extra two years. So male colleagues say, like, we give you all the opportunities that you need.
[00:27:47] Speaker C: I was on a vacation.
[00:27:48] Speaker D: Exactly. Exactly. As if you're in a vacation. I.
Without actually questioning the power dynamics, without questioning the inequality inside academia, it's going to. The status quo is going to remain a sub. You know, I'm from the faculty of Arts where the majority are women. The majority, as you have seen, the majority of admission, the majority of graduate studies, the majority even of professors. This year is the first time we have a woman. G. Thank you very much, Dr. Amal. It's.
[00:28:27] Speaker A: This is Women of the Middle east podcast. Thank you for listening and watching. To stay up to date with Women of the Middle east podcast, you can subscribe and don't forget to rate us. If you would like to contact me directly, you can do so on Instagram or via email.
