Nour Al Hassan
In a region with a dismal record for female employment, one CEO has done what no one else has done before - built a successful company where 90 percent of employees are women.
Nour Al Hassan founded the translation service Tarjama in 2007, with the mission of creating a sustainable work environment that would support the needs of Arab women entering the workforce.
Meeting the needs of Arab women
"Most of the females that work with us across the region are working mothers, taking care of their kids. They can't [do] a 9 to 5 job being in an office or commuting to the office," Al Hassan told CNN.
Rather than forcing women to fit into a traditionally male orientated work environment, Tarjama created a structure that allowed women to work remotely and schedule their hours around their existing commitments, such as childcare.
Indeed, male working environments have not been successful at recruiting women in the Middle East.
According to the World Bank only 22 percent of the workforce in the Middle East was made up of women in 2016, making it the region with the lowest rate of female participation in the world.
However, Tarjama has benefitted from the high number of female university graduates in the region, especially in the field of languages.
This has allowed the company to hire 60 women from Al Hassan’s home country of Jordan alone, despite the fact that only 14 percent of the workforce there is female.
Challenging Traditional Notions of Women’s Place in Society
Although Al Hassan’s business has been extremely successful at hiring women, conservative ideas about women’s roles continues to be a debilitating issue.
"It's definitely cultural," Al Hassan said. "The majority of jobs... high paid jobs go to men. If you go to employers today, due to maternity leave and other reasons, they prefer hiring a man versus a woman."
Not all of Al Hassan’s employees are supported by their families and some even have to hide the fact that they have a job from their husbands
Tarjama does what it can, and along with employing qualified women, it runs training programmes in Saudi Arabia and the UAE in order to provide women with the skills they need to enter the workforce.
However, Al Hassan is aware that one company is not enough to challenge the region’s patriarchal ideas about womanhood.
The UAE a Model for Women’s Employment in the Region
Tarjama is based in the UAE, a country that has put women’s empowerment at the centre of its public policy.
This has resulted in a drastic increase in women’s participation in the workforce, with 42 percent of women in the country currently employed.
"Leadership [in the UAE] have been amazing about women empowerment," said Al Hassan. "You get a fair opportunity if you are a female and interested."
She hopes that other countries in the region will follow the UAE’s lead and become more economically stable by creating policies that encourage women to enter the workforce.
"If half of society is sitting at home and not working you have a paralyzed economy, unfortunately."
