A year of Taliban takeover: The missing women in Afghan workforce
(the talibangelicals in this country would do the same if they could get away with it)
A year of Taliban takeover: The missing women in Afghan workforce
While the new regime has not directly fired female government employees, it has restricted women from entering the workplaces.
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Afghan women chant slogans and hold banners during a women's rights protest march in Kabul [File: Wakil Kohsar/AFP]
By Ruchi Kumar and Zuhal Ahad
Published On 11 Aug 202211 Aug 2022
It has been a year since 43-year-old Masuda Samar, a senior official at an Afghanistan ministry, stepped into her office.On August 15 last year, she rushed home early from work to be with her family after hearing that the then Afghan president had fled the country, paving the way for the Taliban to seize capital Kabul. When she went back a few days after the chaos that followed the takeover ebbed, Samar, who requested her name to be changed to avoid persecution by the Taliban, was told she was no longer welcome in the office where she had spent the last 17 years of her life. The Taliban imposed several limitations on women’s freedoms since returning to power.
‘I feel so insulted’
While the new regime has not directly fired female government employees such as Samar, it has restricted women from entering the workplaces, paying them a significantly reduced salary to stay at home, many working Afghan women told Al Jazeera. “We went back several times in the last one year [to appeal for their jobs]. We decided to wait at the gates of the ministry for days at end waiting to get a hold of the new minister, to convince him to change this decision, but they [Taliban guards] would send us away,” Samar told Al Jazeera. Samar has been withdrawing her meagre salary regularly due to financial pressures on her family. But she feels humiliated. “Each time I go to the bank, I wipe my tears first because I feel so insulted to take that amount, that I don’t even have the right to work and earn. I feel like a beggar,” she said.
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A study by the International Labor Organization (ILO) this year documented a disproportionate drop in women’s employment in Afghanistan – 16 percent in the months immediately following the Taliban takeover. In contrast, male employment dropped by 6 percent. “In the pessimistic scenario in which restrictions intensify and women do not feel they can safely show up at their workplaces, the scale of job losses for women could reach 28 percent,” the report warned. Prior to the Taliban takeover, women made up 22 percent of the Afghan workforce. While the figure is still dismal, it reflected years of social progress in a deeply patriarchal and conservative society like Afghanistan. “Female labour force participation in Afghanistan had been increasing tremendously in the last decades, in some cases better than our regional neighbours,” Afghan economist Saeda Najafizada told Al Jazeera.
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While the Afghan economy has severely suffered due to the Western sanctions on the Taliban, women-centric businesses were among the worst affected due to the additional restrictions on women. A recent World Bank survey noted that 42 percent of women-owned businesses in Afghanistan had temporarily closed compared with 26 percent of the firms owned by men. Additionally, about 83 percent of the businesswomen indicated that they were expecting revenue losses over the next six months, forcing them to engage in coping mechanisms such as downsizing their staff, often comprising largely of women. “A quarter of women-owned businesses indicated that insecurity and restrictions on women’s commercial and economic activities were among their top three concerns,” said the report.
The absence of women from the workforce is being felt by their male colleagues as well.
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https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/8/11/a-year-of-taliban-takeover-the-missing-women-in-afghan-workforce