Gendered roles and language



According to Arabic grammar, if there are 99 women and only one man among them, the masculine pronoun will be used. The verbs should be identical to the subjects which are either masculine or feminine.

Some skills are considered feminine, only for women, such as cooking, sewing; while others are considered masculine like carpentry, carrying heavy loads, building muscles, etc.
The woman who hasn't got married yet is called a 'spinster'. While there's no equivalent word for men in the same situation.  If a man talks a lot, he's normally told, 'You're talkative like women are'.
When people swear, they usually insult the mother of the other person.

"They 'women' are crazy" is a famous song for the Egyptian singer Abou Elleef, in which he generally describes women as being insane. The song says something like, "Every woman is different but what they have in common is that they are crazy. In the morning, you find her cheerful while in the evening she turns aggressive. They are easily peevish. They are crazy, no one is able to understand them. Don't waste your efforts trying to decipher them. Others tried but failed.


In Islam, women can't be an Imam for men or even a mix of men and women. She's only allowed to lead women in prayers. 


Many people, including women, believe there are jobs for which women are not fit. In Egypt the drivers of all the trains, buses and motorcycles are male, as well as the construction workers. However, a few women have managed to find work as pilots. Almost all who work in kindergartens are female. 

As far as I know, all chefs in hotels are men, although cooking in our society is considered the women's task and men normally don't help with it inside their houses. It seems as far as chefs are concerned because cooking is a job and they get paid for it, they don't mind doing it.

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