For a decade now, Yemen has held the last position in the Gender Gap Index. This index shows that Yemen has the widest gap in gender equality among other countries across the continent. This poor performance is reflected in our high rates of maternal mortality and lack of educational opportunities for women, but this underdevelopment has been exacerbated by a …
Our Islamic high school teacher in Yemen often gave the 30 girls in our class a variation of the same lecture: “The chaste woman is a woman which protects her virginity. She walks close to the wall in the street looking down and not making eye contact with other men. She doesn’t raise her voice …
"Ya amar, ya amar." When I was a teenager, I used to love hearing those words — which mean something like "hey, gorgeous" in Arabic — hissed and whispered at me by men on the street in Cairo, where I spent my summers. I never got that kind of attention in suburban Southern California, where …
When Rasha Jarhum, an Aspen New Voices fellow and member of the Yemeni Women Pact for Peace and Security, started working with Syrian refugees in Lebanon and Jordan in 2014, she saw the war in her native Yemen escalate, and her family were forced to leave. The numbers of people fleeing Yemen are still rapidly increasing — more …