Safa al-Saeedi (d) and Dalal Abedlamir at a Basra Gas Company gas field on January 20, 2022 near Basra, Iraq (AFP/Hussein Faleh)
The role of wife and mother traditionally assigned to Iraqi women, very little for them. Safa al-Saeedi and Dalal Abdelamir are engineers in the gas and oil fields of southern Iraq, a “challenge” in a country marked by strong conservatism.
This life, “she chose me, not me”, frees Safa from the outset. At 29, she is one of 180 women among the 5,000 employees of the Basra Gas Company, where she has worked as an engineer for seven years.
She climbed the ladder one by one to go from employee to team leader in this energy behemoth, 51% owned by the South Gas Company (SCG) belonging to the Iraqi Ministry of Petroleum, 44% by Shell and 5% by Mitsubishi.
Safa works for a consecutive month, during which she is housed in the company complex, more than half an hour from the family home. Then she returns home to Basra, a large city in the Shiite south, to rest for the next four weeks, when she is not indulging in her passion for travel, which has taken her to around thirty countries.
Safa al-Saeedi, an engineer at a Basra Gas Company gas field, on January 20, 2022 near Basra, Iraq (AFP/Hussein Faleh)
What ruffle some relatives who do not accept that a young single woman lives far from home to evolve in a sector dominated by men, in a country where only 13% of women are engaged in the labor market, according to UN statistics.
“I often hear them say to me: + you are almost 30 years old, you will miss the boat! You will end up single +. It makes me laugh, but I do not answer”, says Safa, hair and earrings in the wind.
From the start, “it was a challenge (…) but I started on this path”, she insists.
-“Powerful and brilliant women”-
When she is on the oil and gas complex, her daily ritual is immutable: she puts on her overalls, puts on her helmet and goes to work. In the evening, she plays sports in the company room or runs around the huge gas storage balloons.
Safa al-Saeedi jogs in the Basra Gas Company oil and gas complex in Basra on January 20, 2022 in Iraq (AFP/Hussein FALEH)
“I hope to reach a leadership position, because you rarely see women in these positions, even though Iraq has many powerful and brilliant women,” Safa said.
An impression conveyed by a study published last year by two UN agencies: most Iraqis “consider that higher education is as important for women as for men. But the attitude towards equal rights in employment is discriminatory against women”.
In the World Economic Forum (WEF) parity ranking, Iraq was in 152nd place in 2020 … out of 153 countries analyzed.
Safa knows something about it. She acknowledges that in Basra, “society does not accept that a girl lives outside the family home”.
-Fear of “what will people say”-
The young woman graduated from the University of Petroleum Engineering in Basra in 2014 and immediately found a job at Shell, “which required spending some nights away from home”.
Her mother had already opposed this project. She was “afraid of what people will say and that it will affect my reputation and my chances of getting married”, recalls Safa.
No matter. She sees herself as a changemaker and encourages other women to join the oil and gas industry. And she made emulators.
Dalal Abedlamir, a chemical engineer at a Basra Gas Company gas field, on January 20, 2022 near Basra, Iraq (AFP/Hussein Faleh)
Dalal Abdelamir, 24, is a chemical engineer on the same site as Safa. “It’s a childhood dream. It’s an area where you can be creative, whether you’re a man or a woman,” she says.
Dalal entered the Basra Gas Company through a graduate program which had 30 people, 10 of whom were women.
“We didn’t go to Basra University saying we wanted to recruit women. We went there saying we wanted the brightest students,” said group chief executive Malcolm Mayes.
What all the same to intimidate Dalal. “At the beginning, I thought that I was inferior, that I would never have the required level. I was even afraid to ask questions, because I was afraid of appearing incompetent or inferior” to her male colleagues, recalls Dalal.
© 2022 AFP
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