Arab armies turn to women : An illusion or a new reality?
alaraby.co.uk : More armies in the Arab world are drafting women into their operational and strategic planning with Jordan and Algeria, particularly promising case studies. Yet structural and cultural challenges remain to reach gender equity in the armed forces.
In October 2019, Saudi Arabia allowed women to join the kingdom’s armed forces but maintained a legal glass ceiling limiting them to subaltern positions. In parallel, the United Arab Emirates shone a spotlight on Mariam al Mansouri, the first Emirati woman fighter pilot, as she was leading a squadron conducting airstrikes in Syria against the Islamic State group (IS).
The integration of women into Arab armed forces remains uneven across countries, slow and fraught with obstacles, whether they be legal, religious, or societal. However, women are gradually entering the military institution, through proactive policies conducted by the States that have understood the strategic interest of integrating women into national defence.
If the rates tend to grow regionally, women represent still 5 percent of the total military workforce in Lebanon, 7 percent in Tunisia, and 1.5 percent of military personnel excluding medical services in Jordan, according to a study published in 2019 by the Lebanese American University.
A positive evolution
It is certain that the importance of the place of women in the army is far from obvious to many Arab citizens. In Egypt, Article 10 of the Egyptian Constitution guarantees gender equality, but Article 11, which proclaims the attachment to family, religious and patriotic values, has been used as a basis to paralyse progress in this area. To counter such an argument, many intellectuals have pointed out the absence of religious grounds for such a ban.
While activists’ pressure has played a role in the advances made in recent years, advances in the integration of women in the military forces have been driven primarily by operational needs. For instance, the Syrian army is massively integrating women into its combat units not only to fill a manpower gap (about 8,500 women joined the Syrian armed forces and allied militias between 2013 and 2016) but also for technical reasons.
Dalia Ghanem, a researcher for the Carnegie Middle East Research Center, reveals that, “In 2015, there were some 800 women in combat units, according to official figures, fighting in Assad’s army. It was an elite brigade with snipers and tank operators.”
Female soldiers of the Jordanian People’s Army stand in line, rifles in hand, during training [Getty]
The presence of women is also strategic for conducting body searches on civilians in conservative areas, which is why Saudi Arabia has allowed the recruitment of female border guards since 2013.
Moreover, this phenomenon is part of a global strategy to better integrate women into the workforce and combat religious extremism. Female soldiers have become the symbol of the fight against terrorism: their image contrasts with one of women enslaved in the territories controlled by IS, as part of real psychological warfare conducted against the organisation.
Thus, the integration of women into the armed forces carries profound stakes in terms of public communication for these States. These developments are accompanied by real communication campaigns, highlighting certain female figures or emblematic battalions to occult the persistence of military institutions dominated by men. These strategies are particularly useful for States with poor gender records, in attracting the sympathy of the international community.
Despite the apparent backwardness on the issue, the overall situation and mentalities are evolving towards more openness: according to a report published by Aswat Nisaa in 2018, 56 percent of Tunisians surveyed have a positive view of women’s participation in the defence sector, while 60.6 percent of them believe that women have the same technical skills as men.