Arab Flight Attendants

Monday's New York Times ran an article about Etihad's trailblazing female Arab flight attendants.

The article gushes about how states like Abu Dhabi offering "freedoms and opportunities nearly unimaginable elsewhere in the Middle East," but the catch is that the Emirates are offering these opportunities for other Arabs' daughters, not their own. All of the flight attendants mentioned in the article are from other, poorer places like Syria, Iraq, and Egypt. The Emirates are the cradle of sociological change for other Arab expats, but Emirati families remain staunchly conservative in most cases. They can be because they have the money to be. One wonders if the Emirates are fostering positive change that will eventually come around to their own country or simply causing problems for other societies.

Some highlights:

Flight attendants have become the public face of the new mobility for some young Arab women, just as they were the face of new freedoms for women in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s.

...
In the midst of an Islamic revival across the Arab world that is largely being led by young people, gulf states like Abu Dhabi — which offer freedoms and opportunities nearly unimaginable elsewhere in the Middle East — have become an unlikely place of refuge for some young Arab women. And many say that the experience of living independently and working hard for high salaries has forever changed their ambitions and their beliefs about themselves, though it can also lead to a painful sense of alienation from their home countries and their families.
...

Despite the increasing numbers of women moving to the gulf countries, the labor migration patterns of the last 20 years have left the Emirates with a male-female ratio that is more skewed than anywhere else in the world; in the 15-to-64 age group, there are more than 2.7 men for every woman.
...
For many families, allowing a daughter to work, much less to travel overseas unaccompanied, may call her virtue into question and threaten her marriage prospects. Yet this culture is changing, said Musa Shteiwi, a sociologist at Jordan University in Amman. “We’re noticing more and more single women going to the gulf these days,” he said. “It’s still not exactly common, but over the last four or five years it’s become quite an observable phenomenon.”
...
Young women whose work in the gulf supports an extended family often find, to their surprise and chagrin, that work has made them unsuitable for life within that family.
“A very good Syrian friend of mine decided to resign from the airline and go back home,” the Egyptian flight attendant said. “But she can’t tolerate living in a family house anymore. Her parents love her brother and put him first, and she’s never allowed out alone, even if it’s just to go and have a coffee.”
“It becomes very difficult to go home again,” she said.