In a male-dominated society, there is a disproportionately small representation of women. In Egypt, women are underrepresented in political and legislative bodies, such as parliament, the judiciary and the Constituent Assembly commissioned to draft the Egyptian constitution. Women also face a variety of obstacles in their day-to-day lives, from finding a job to receiving a high-quality education. In an effort to combat that, a group of students have launched an initiative called Heya (She): The Women’s Initiative to provide women with the tools for realizing their untapped potential and encourage the community to appreciate a woman’s worth in society.

“I want to voice my opinion about issues that concern me as a woman in the Arab world,” said Yara El Razaz, co-founder of the Heya initiative and a business administration junior. “This is something I have been passionate about since high school, and I believe an initiative working for the good of women is an important addition to AUC.”

The Heya initiative, co-founded by El Razaz and economics junior Heba Hesham, aims to express student views on women's issues and give others that same platform through raising the question, Heya meen? (Who is she?). “My co-founder Heba and I had a vision and wanted to see it materialize on and off campus,” said El Razaz.  “We’re not trying to dictate a certain template that we believe the ‘empowered woman’ fits, but rather we want to provide women at AUC, as well as those in our community, with the tools to discover that themselves.”

The initiative, divided into two phases, will focus first on empowering women in the AUC community through awareness. The goal of the second phase is to give women the tools to help themselves succeed and then reach out to other women in the community. Students will assist women in various communities by providing job opportunities or enhancing employment through small-scale projects. This semester, the initiative will mainly focus on workshops, lectures and campaigns, hosting influential women from the local and international spheres to encourage civic engagement in the community.

Heya’s first on-campus appearance was the Heya Meen? campaign, which helped to formulate an understanding of how the AUC community views women. During the campaign, students involved in the initiative approached other students to explore how they view Egyptian women. Male and female respondents wrote their answers on the back of campaign T-shirts, and responses were classified according to gender. The two groups of responses were then displayed in a cloud map on International Women’s Day. The size of each response presented correlated with its frequency, with the more popular responses appearing larger on the map.

“We received a wide range of results, ranging from ‘kitchen’ to ‘independent’ to ‘strong,’” said El Razaz. “Overall, I think the results were a great way of seeing how the AUC community views women – both how men view women and how women view themselves.”

The initiative’s upcoming on-campus event in May will be a dialogue in collaboration with Beyond Borders, a student organization that aims at building mutual understanding among students from various cultural backgrounds. The dialogue will revolve around the theme, The Best and Worst Places to be a Woman, focusing on a cross-cultural analysis of womanhood in different parts of the world, touching on laws, culture and norms with relation to education, marriage and divorce.

In addition to on-campus activities, Heya is pursuing a number of off-campus projects. The first involves AUC students working closely with a group of 9-year-old girls. “Our project is basically a tutoring and mentoring program with the girls at Amalna [Our Hope] Orphanage in Nasr City,” said El Razaz. Each girl is assigned two student associates who visit on a weekly basis to tutor them in order to create a long-term, sibling relationship with the girls. “The student would be someone the girls will hopefully be able to trust and look up to,” added El Razzaz.

The students are now in the planning stages for three other off-campus projects. The first is an entrepreneurship program for women who have graduated from public universities, providing them with English language and computer training. They are also planning a health awareness campaign in Shubra to teach women about personal hygiene and contraception. The final project is a rehabilitation program for women who were injured or lost a family member during the revolution.

To encourage open discussions about issues facing women in Egypt, the Heya Initiative is in the process of creating a blog, That’s What She Didn’t Say, featuring weekly discussion topics and articles by students.  AUC community members are encouraged to read the blog and participate in the discussions. The blog will be launched in Fall 2012.