BEIRUT: Arab women are taking more senior government posts than before but many are still years away from challenging men’s domination of key decision-making positions, a top UN official says. Several Arab states have allocated parliamentary seats and cabinet portfolios for women, but the failure to challenge stereotypes depicting women as inferior to men could hamper such progress, UN Under Secretary-General Mervat Tallawy said.

“Despite the many achievements in the last five years, women in the Arab world are still far from equality and still face many challenges,” said Tallawy, also executive secretary of the Beirut-based Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia.

“Soap operas still give the woman roles where she sits and chops vegetables while the man is sitting in front of a computer. The woman cries and screams in the face of the first problem, while the man is wise,” she told Reuters.

Not enough efforts to educate men about the importance of women’s political participation, argued Tallawy, makes it hard to preserve the gains that pro-women legislation has secured or to move beyond them.

Despite a significant rise in the number of educated women across the Arab world, having a female as the top executive of a big company is almost unheard of. In Saudi Arabia, women are still not allowed to drive cars.

Honour killing — the murder of women by their relatives for suspected extra-marital sex — still happens in Arab countries.

Tallawy said Jordan was reviewing an article in its penal code that makes the perpetrator of an honour killing subject only to a six-month jail sentence.

Despite the problems, Tallawy says the picture is not bleak.

She pointed to measures taken in several Arab countries to ensure women were represented politically; Morocco reserves about 30 per cent of parliament seats for women; Tunisia 22 per cent and Iraq at least 25 per cent.

Representation varies in other countries, sinking as low as four or five per cent in Egypt. Lebanon’s 128-seat parliament has only five women deputies.

Egyptian women married to foreigners can now also pass on their nationalities to their children.

Asked if an Arab woman might become president or prime minister in the near future, an achievement enjoyed in other developing countries like Liberia and Pakistan, she said: “I really doubt it.”—Reuters #