About a week ago, I had an interesting debate with my students about men and women and their role in society. I had started by telling them an anecdote. As I have mentioned before, about half of my students are Muslim men.

Anyway, the first issue we tackled was women and work. I asked them what they thought about women earning a living. I was a bit surprised when I heard that all of the men had nothing against women having a job. The Muslim men had a couple of remarks though.

muslim woman (Photo credit: Jarek Jarosz)

The first remark was about the kind of work. For them it is clear that there are jobs that are suitable for women and jobs that are not. They had no problems with female teachers and nurses for example, but a female truck or bus driver was out of the question. Those were jobs for men. Work that implied a lot of physical effort or that was dirty or both was not suitable for women.

What about a pc technician? My students follow a training to become one and one of them is a (non-Muslim) woman. Moreover, they all know that I at some point in my career worked as an IT helpdesk agent. The non-Muslim answered that both sexes should be capable to do this kind of work. I saw the Muslim men looking at each other and hesitating. Finally, one of them said that it was no problem and the others agreed. I am not sure whether they were really convinced about this or whether they said it out of respect for me and their female colleague.

The second remark concerned the household. My Muslim students were okay about a woman having a job, but her career should not interfere with her duties at home! Raising children is a priority for both parents, but when it comes to cooking and cleaning, that is clearly something for women. Non-Muslim men on the other hand participate in the household.

At this point the debate became very lively. I asked the Muslim men what they would do in case of divorce for example. Who is going to cook for them? Who is going to clean their house? Who is going to wash their clothes? The answer was very simple: they would move back to their parents’ home! And they added that a man who cooks and/or cleans is not a real man!

As you can imagine the non-Muslim men were not too happy about this remark… But the biggest shock came when our female student announced that she didn’t know how to cook at all, that she didn’t like it and that she did not have the intention to learn it. Ever… For about two seconds, there was absolute silence and then all hell broke loose! All the men now turned against her, but she didn’t care about it.

Then they all looked at me. Do I cook? Sure, I do, but not every day. My soul mate is at home all day, whereas I have a fulltime job, the blog, my novel and my photography. So, there are evenings that I cook and evenings that I don’t cook. And most of the household is done by my soulmate. I wanted to add that during the weekends we do some stuff together, but at that time half of the group had become so boisterous that I decided to have a break.

Afterwards, the debate continued… But that’s for another post!