What Lebanese women

think about gender

discrimination and what
it is in fact

JINAN NABAA
11930551

Research methodology COMM310- Dr.Moussa Dirani

 Topic
Lebanese women’s opinion about the discrimination (what Lebanese women think
about gender discrimination and what it is in fact)
Introduction
Everyone has the right to be treated fairly and respectfully, yet discrimination is a
viral attitude, which is dealing with or the treatment towards people based on some
factors such as age, sex or gender, color, nationality, and so on. As for gender
discrimination, it is mostly against women, meaning that women are weaker than
men. Women cannot be in the workplace, do not deserve things the men have,
and this type of discrimination appears in so many ways. It can appear as legal
gender discrimination, social gender discrimination, and even between the
couples, there’s gender discrimination, in the workplace, schools, and universities,
and even in the street.
Since the birth of children, everything around the girls and the boys are symbolized
to categorize every behavior, attitude, hobby, and material thing. So women and
men become two different categories. That’s what affects in the long term the
nature of the relationship between any woman and man, whether it is a friendship,
or brotherhood, or even marriage.
The Lebanese law does not provide women with legislation to her minimum rights
such as the right to bodily their integrity, to be free from sexual violence, having
equal rights in family law, educating, giving her nationality to her children.
Furthermore, women hold to face discrimination underneath the 15 wonderful faith-
based personal status laws. Discrimination consists of inequality in getting
admission to divorce, toddler custody, and assets rights. not like guys, Lebanese
women also can't skip on their nationality to foreign husbands and children, and
are subject to discriminatory inheritance legal guidelines
In 2017, the Lebanese Parliament abolished Article 522. This allows the rapist to
avoid prosecution by marrying the victim but can promise to marry a child or virgin
girl between the ages of 15 and 17 and have sex.

Lack of coordination in the government’s response to gender discrimination

against women continues to put women and girls in danger,
The Lebanese parliament did not soak up draft bills that might set the age of
marriage at 18. Noting that in Lebanon there’s no minimum age for marriage.
Instead, recently the Muslim Sunni religious court decided to forbid marriage under
age 15 after so many years that girls at a very young age are getting married in all
of the religious sectors.

In addition, in 2014 a law on the protection of women and families from Domestic
violence establishes important protection measures and introduced policing and
court reforms. But it failed to criminalize all forms of domestic violence, including
marital rape and sexual harassment which lately in December 2020 became a
crime in Lebanese law.

Some women are still facing obstacles to protect themselves from so many types
of gender discrimination which they face daily such as abusing whether mentally
or physically and this point in addition to what is mentioned above will be discussed
in the research which I believe that all the youth, elders and children need to be
open up with what’s happening passively and actively as gender discrimination
around them and how it is affecting the society’s stability. What Lebanese women
think about gender discrimination? How can the law protect them? How is the
Lebanese law against women in some cases? How is gender discrimination
against women is absorbed by society since ever? What is the opinion of the
organization that concerns women’s affairs?

Literature review
Gender discrimination against women in all ways of representation has been a
discussion topic in academic institutions and even in the lobby. Recently,
Professors at the Lebanese International University, Noha Haidar discussed in her
research ‘Gender leadership and excellence’ (September, 12,2018) the
employment of women in the higher education sector, based on 3 questions which
are: Are women fairly represented in HEI top management positions or not? Why?
Is there a relationship between the excellence of Lebanese institutions and the
presence of women? Using a qualitative method to apply to the sample of research
which contains the Lebanese society as research’s community and the audience
which are women working in the higher education sector and experts in the
mentioned sector. In her research, Dr.Noha discusses how women are
discriminated against and not given a higher position in all types of jobs and
especially education-wise while statistics and studies prove that women are a great
factor to empower the education sector. As a result of her research, she noticed
that there is an insufficient presence of women in senior executive positions.
However, things are slowly changing: the rate of women in senior executive
positions has increased over the past decade. Efforts by public institutions to
promote equity have been made within organizations. Even if the situation
develops slowly, the rate of women in senior executive positions increases each
year. Women’s organizations in Lebanon have a long history of struggle towards
gender equality.
Not so long before Sarah Barakat researched “the cost of justice” (April 2018)
where she proposed the fact that women taking her rights from courts is too much
expensive materialistic, and moral wise, and then she asked What are the relevant
departments/sections charged with personal status and family-related cases in
each of the targeted countries? What are the existing mechanisms dealing with
women’s cases in terms of personal status and family laws? Are there special
mechanisms and assistance services for poor and vulnerable women? What are
the administrative and judicial procedures dealing with personal status and family
law cases for women? Who are the influential actors involved in the administrative
and judicial procedures? What are the factors determining the length of
administrative and judicial procedures within courts? And how do these factors
determine the cost of the lawsuit? After collecting data and analyzing in the MENA
region as a whole using a combined methodology between qualitative and
quantitative on the research’s community which are MENA region and the
audience which are the women in the region mentioned above, she discovered
that though differing among countries and confessions, personal status laws are
all discriminatory against women. Courts lack adequate human resources and
infrastructure. They are almost exclusively staffed by men, contributing to
discriminatory attitudes and behaviors against women /Widespread corruption and
insider influence are common and contribute to further marginalizing and
discriminating against poor and marginalized individuals, especially women, Basic
knowledge of personal status rights, laws, and procedures is still limited and
contributes to the marginalization of women.
As it is mentioned at the beginning of the literature review, gender discrimination
against women is everywhere, in every behavior and every position in personal
and professional life. Speaking about that, Sarah Mallat and Jad Melki discussed
in their book ‘The Palgrave International Handbook of Women and Journalism’
(July,18,2013) how women are struggling for gender equality and harassment-free
in the newsroom, asking how men treat women in the workplace? What is the
situation of Lebanese journalists? how the gender affect employment in Lebanon?
After they used the qualitative methodology on the Lebanese society ad research’s
community and targeting their audience which re Lebanese jounalists women, they
had a result which concluded by that minority voices, including that of women, and
social issues, many of which directly concern women, are pushed to the fringes
and receive little or no attention. In addition, gender discrimination and sexual
harassment in the workplace and on the job still present significant problems for
women journalists in Lebanon. Lebanese laws along with professional media
industry associations lack specific stipulations and regulations regarding both
issues. This carries over into news media organizations’ policies, which also
largely ignore the questions of gender discrimination and sexual harassment in the
workplace. However, the growing body of testimony suggests that sexual
harassment, in particular, is a systemic problem.
Equally important, Professors at the American University in Beirut, Dima Jamali,
Yusuf Sidani, and Assem Saffieddine explored in their research ‘women in
management(2005) the constraints that Lebanese women managers deal with
throughout their careers. Their main question was: what are the constraints facing
working women? Using qualitative methodology on the Lebanese society and their
audience(working women in management) they concluded that the women
managers identified numerous constraints of a structural nature, including
exclusion from formal and informal networks, the absence of relevant benefits, and
corporate developmental assignments that are used to groom male managers,
almost exclusively, for senior leadership in their companies. Several women
reported having been denied informal networking opportunities with colleagues.
Some of the women managers interviewed pointed out that not all organizations in
Lebanon have cultures that enhance gender interaction; many organizations have
a strong masculine culture, which translates more concretely into structural
arrangements that isolate and alienate women. Consequently, women managers
were simply not getting the same opportunities as their male colleagues for mixing
throughout the organization, neither horizontally nor vertically

Methodology
The methodology that will be used in this research is the qualitative method.
Sample
Lebanese society is the research’s community
And the audience is Lebanese women and the experts in gender discrimination