Starting a business in Egypt is never an easy feat, but poses a unique set of challenges and advantages for Egyptian women in particular, who are increasingly leaping into entrepreneurial ventures. Yasmine El-Mehairy, the co-founder of Arabic-language parenting website Supermama, explains that the newness of "entrepreneurialism" in Egypt allows women in Egypt a significant edge, but there is still an everyday battle against cultural stereotypes. "It's as basic as… getting a plumber to work in the office without him staring at you or saying inappropriate comments and things like that," El-Mehairy said, adding that these are aspects of running a business that infuriate her. She described how difficult it is to get "workers to do anything, even just buying your laptops, without the guy asking: 'Oh you don't have a man coming to buy those laptops?' It's not because you're a woman entrepreneur, it's because you're a woman full stop." Then there is the pressure and judgmental comments coming from extended family and friends of friends about why El-Mehairy is still single: "Of course there is the social look of, 'Ah she's an entrepreneur, of course that explains why she's not married at 30, that's it'." Startup investment and news website Wamda organised "Wamda for Women" roundtables this year in Cairo, Doha, Riyadh and Amman, and the exchanges show that El-Mehairy's experiences are not unique to Egypt. The main takeaways from each session were that women suffer from negative stereotypes and have to fight to be seen and treated as equals. In Saudi Arabia, women have the extra challenges of not being allowed to drive, making it difficult to get to meetings, and segregated offices, making it difficult for small companies to hire mixed-gender staff. But El-Mehairy was positive about what she called the startup ecosystem in Egypt, because women are taken more seriously as entrepreneurs than they are in the west, which allows them to get on with making their idea into a fully fledged business quicker.
El-Mehairy and her co-founder Zeinab Samir spent three months in Copenhagen in 2012 at the Startupbootcamp business accelerator. From that vantage point she noted that there are various startup environments different than she was used to in Egypt. "In the incubator [a centre that provides resources, space and an environment for startups and entrepreneurs to grow their businesses] that we were in there were only four women: me and Zainab, Yasmin Elayat who introduced us, and another woman, while there were around 20-something gentlemen. I think we were ten teams altogether, and three teams had women in them; the rest were all men." These numbers reflect the general statistics: women make up about a third of the entrepreneurs in Jordan's influential Oasis500 incubator and are estimated to be about 15 per cent of the entrepreneurs in Egypt. Furthermore, according to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor's recently released report on women's entrepreneurialism in 2012, in the US only ten per cent of the total adult female population was involved in entrepreneurial activity, five per cent in startup powerhouse Israel and five per cent in "developed" Europe.
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