Marrakesh, July 26, 2013
Tonight on my way back
home I took a taxi and the driver was a woman. Actually, I have been
many times in a taxi with a female driver. Yet this time, I couldn’t
help but notice how so many people would stare at her. Some would even
point fingers at the woman looking surprised and almost annoyed by her
being behind the wheel. What annoyed me even more is a young woman who
after realizing the taxi driver was a woman found an excuse not to get
in the cab and walked away.
Women have started
recently doing jobs that have always been reserved for men, such as
driving taxis and buses. However, these women are not given enough
credit as if they will never be as good as men. There are those
well-known stereotypes for instance concerning women drivers and how
they just can never be good drivers. Nowadays, this stereotype has become commonplace and male drivers who are not so good would be said to drive ‘like women’.
In my opinion, driving
skills have nothing to do with gender as I have come across many men
drivers who are terrible on the road. However, there is some truth to
this narrative; women can be relatively more scared then men. But again
we cannot generalize. There are good men drivers as well as bad and the
same applies to women.
I had a little chat
with the taxi driver I met about her daily life and I asked her a few
questions about how she feels being a taxi driver and whether she gets
disrespected or harassed by men. She explained: “It is alright, work is
good.”
At first she did not
want to talk about men harassment but when I insisted she added: “not
really no. Because I put limits every time it happens. There were two
cases but I put limits every time. They can sometimes be very
disrespectful.”
Then she told me the
two stories in details about some men who made sexual advances to her in
indirect ways. I feel the need to point out that the veiled woman is
married and has children. She furiously told me about one man who was
very disrespectful to her: “he touched my hand and said he would take
good care of me if I would go home with him to his fancy villa.”
The men would usually
brag about their huge villas and great wealth trying to tempt the woman
assuming she would be interested because she works as a taxi driver. The
idea that men have about women who do jobs such as taxi driving is the
biggest problem here. These uneducated, brainless men believe they have every right to hit on those women because they chose such jobs.
For some males, the fact that a woman is driving a tax is interpreted as an open invitation for sex (as stupid as it sounds).
Those female taxi
drivers are women who go out every day to work all day long to be able
to provide for themselves and support their families. And sadly, they
have to do this while struggling with all these stereotypes and
misrepresentations and most importantly being in constant fear of sexual
harassment.
To these fighters, I take my hat off!
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