I wanted to write about women in Iraq this weekend, so I decided to meet with some from different walks of life. That way I could have a better sense of what females are feeling and thinking about in life and how much freedom they feel like they have. Now I want to describe some of the highlights.

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Last Saturday morning, during a break from German class, my classmates and I started discussing how some professions that used to be mostly male are now mostly pursued by women. That causes some tension, and it brings about the need for cultural change, as I described in my last entry.

This subtle antipathy can surface unexpectedly in day-to-day life. For instance, my classmate Mariana is studying biology. She told me that once, in a physics class, she and the other students had to make a circuit. The male teacher, after communicating the task, said: “Let’s see how women can manage this one,” clearly assuming electronics was totally a “guy thing.”

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I had dinner with my boyfriend’s parents last Sunday. It’s always just the four of us. I have to admit that sometimes I lead the conversation into his mother, Carolina, telling me the story of how she started dating Horacio, Diego’s father. It’s not because of the love and romance involved, though. The story of how she met her husband touches on issues of how she secured some independence and got her first job.

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Last week on one of the television stations there was a report about school children who have to travel 10 hours to attend one hour of school. Hard to believe in this day and age! It’s because there are no schools nearby, and the transport system in that remote part of the country is almost non-existent.

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One of my friends has recently been offered a position as a professor in a foreign university. While discussing the offer with him, I thought about our job market and would like to share some ideas about it.

I’ll start with the step just after graduating from university. There are people who work in spheres that have nothing to do with their university degree, and that is mostly due to low wages in the professional spheres they would occupy.

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In my experience in Iraq, the opportunities open to the genders differ according to social setting, age, geographical area and religious believes. We have equality more or less during early childhood, but you still see some differences in how boys and girls are treated.

I think that the opportunities open to males are not limited. They have choices from childhood onward, and they are even allowed to bend the rules. But females are always limited in the chances they have, specifically starting around age 14. Women have to struggle to get their own rights and freedoms, and many of them have sacrificed themselves to provide the freedoms others have today.

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