Ahmad has been preoccupied with cars since she was a young girl, but she never thought she would end up making a living out of her love for being behind the wheel. For the past two years, Ahmad has been driving a taxi through the streets of Hebron in the southern occupied West Bank. She says that her husband, a professor of information technology at a local university, never challenged her dream of driving a taxi – but many others in the community were not as open to her unusual job choice.
While she never planned to make a political statement with her career, there is no getting around it:Ahmad is believed to be the only female taxi driver in all of Palestine.
Her floral-printed mauve headscarf and long black abaya stand out among the rows of bare male elbows poking out of the drivers’ windows in the bustling city of Hebron.
She says that her husband, a professor of information technology at a local university, never challenged her dream of driving a taxi – but many others in the community were not as open to her unusual job choice.
Women account foronlyone-fifth of the workforce in the occupied West Bank, and many take on the rolestraditionallyseen as “female”, such as teaching, nursing, or cleaning. Mothers who work while their children are home from school are sometimes frowned upon.
For Palestinian women to break out of the gendered roles in society,Abu Taima says they will have to be prepared for the same kind of backlash and community gossip to which Ahmad was initially subjected.
We will look back and see [that] these women who made the first jump into ‘male’ fields helped push us towards equality.
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