Women lose education rights in Egypt Two female students hold banners while facing Egyptian riot police during an anti-government protest by university students in front of the Egyptian ministry of higher education in Cairo, Egypt Monday, Oct. 18, 2010. The protest was organized by university students from the Muslim Brotherhood opposition group against what they called police brutality against them. The women in Egypt used to enjoy equal rights in education before the revolution in their country. Now theyre struggling to take them back. National Edition Education rights for women suffer in Egypt, which the Thomas Reuters Foundation declared Nov. 12 to be the worst country in the Middle East for womens rights overall. The poll that the Thomas Reuters Foundation used to determine this rating assessed different factors such as violence against women, reproductive rights and integration into society among other things. When the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist political party, came into power in 2012, it wrote a new constitution that limited women’s rights, including the right to an education — a right they had previously enjoyed. “One clause, for example, asserted every Egyptian woman’s right to education and employment opportunities, but with the qualification ‘as long as it doesn’t conflict with her domestic duties,’” according to Al Jazeera America. Since the Muslim Brotherhood was ousted from power earlier this year by the Egyptian military, the interim government has attempted to fix the mistakes of the previous administration. Al Jazeera America reported Monday that a group of politicians known as the Committee of 50 has been tasked with rewriting the Egyptian constitution. In response to this, the Daily News Egypt reported that some women have taken to the streets, calling on the Committee of 50 to amend the constitution to protect the rights of women to have an education as well as gender equality in general. “We’re here to show the [Constituent Assembly] that our demands for the constitution … include complete equality between men and women,” said Hala Mostafa as quoted in the article by the Daily News Egypt. Before the 2011 revolution in the country, Egypt had one of the better education rights for women in the Middle East. In November 2011, half of all university students in Egypt were women, according to an article in the Global Press Journal. A column in the Collegiate Times that same year said that Egyptian women were as educated as Egyptian men.
Posted on: Wed, 20 Nov 2013 17:39:04 +0000
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