An Egyptian TV reporter, Lamia Hamdin, became the center of a social media storm a few days ago when she was photographed holding her nearly two-year-old son while she interviewed someone on the street in Cairo. A Cairo University student called Mohamed Abdel Nasser, who happened to be walking by, snapped a picture of the scene and uploaded it to his Facebook page with a hashtag, which insulted journalists, according to the site Buzzfeed.
Abdel Nasser said in his post that journalism was a job for people who could not get any other work. This quickly attracted many other comments, including many that attacked Hamdin for not staying at home to take care of her son. This caused Abdel Nasser to take down his post, saying he did not like the misogynist comments that it was attracting.
Hamdin said she was surprised at the fuss raised over her holding her son while she worked. “I am a regular woman. I picked up my son from daycare and carried on with my job so I would not compromise my work,” she told the Youm7 news website. She added that her husband works abroad, that she had no one else to leave her son with, and that he was off-camera. “Would people have me leave him out on the street?” Hamdin asked.
Which is the conundrum that all workingwomen in the Arab world face: Where and with whom to leave your very young children when you have to go to work? Traditional extended families, in which grandmothers and aunts helped to raise the children, are becoming rare, and the stay-at-home mom too is not as common as she used to be.
Daycare centers certainly help greatly in this regard, but with the much younger children these centers usually take them in only for a limited number of hours every day, leaving not much time for working mothers to work in. Clearly, extended daycare hours are needed for workingwomen who cannot afford to hire nannies or who do not have extended family members to help take care of their children.
Luckily for Hamdin the head of her channel was supportive of her plight, saying that women like her should be “held in high regard.” But rather than just pay lip-service to her, the TV boss should perhaps think of setting up a crèche at the station to take care of the very young children of female employees such as Hamdin. If she had been given that option, she certainly would not have been forced to hold her son while interviewing a person on the sidewalk.
Workingwomen all over the world, including here in Saudi Arabia, face these daily trials of juggling work, taking care of their children and household duties. If free or affordable daycare were available to all women and their children who need it, our world would be a much calmer and happier place.
—
The writer is a Saudi journalist based in Brazil.
