Reports | 25 05 2020
"These days, young people have become a rare coin," says Abu Mohammed, a shop’s owner in Damascus, who needs a man to work with him, and can’t find!
"Wanted: girls to work" it has been a normal phrase years ago, but has spread significantly in Damascus, especially on the windows and doors of shops and restaurants, where the work depends mostly on the young.
Shops were once exclusive to young male people such as restaurants, grocery stores sometimes, but in the light of the current crisis, everything has changed because of the compulsory service and the flight of young people.
Escape from war!
Because of mandatory service in the regime’ army, a lot of young men have migrated from the regime’s control areas, particularly Damascus, what opened the way for women to enter different fields of work.
Abu Mohammed, the owner of a shop in a central market in Damascus, said: "taking young people to serve either as a backup or mandatory and the escape of the rest because of the war, forced us to put working ads asking for girls to work in our shops."
He confirms, that many fields of work are so difficult for the female, saying: "For example, girls can’t do the work of loading and unloading goods, can’t be late at night if needed to be, but the good thing of hiring them, that as an owner I have no fear anymore of entering the Security Forces to take them to the backup service. "
Regime forces began about year ago, an intensive campaign to take the youth to the compulsory Service, what made a crisis for the various employment fields in Damascus, whether public or private, especially to certain professions that don’t suit female.
Girls’ new professions
Because of the current circumstances in Syria, women entered many fields of work and had to bear many burdens, so they often played the role of a whole family!
The journalist Rasha says: "During the war in Syria, women worked in many hard fields for the first time, that was because of the loss of a breadwinner in the house."
According to Rasha, Syrian women tried to invent kinds of works inside the home, in order to save their safety and to cope with traditions that refuse female workers, where they convert their homes into workshops for sewing, packaging candies, prepare vegetables, and cooking, which provides an acceptable income for them.
She adds: "Social networking sites, especially (Facebook) had a big role in helping women who work at home, where they use it to promote their products."
The public and private sector became "feminine"
"Samiha", an employee of a government department in Damascus, confirming that last year, there was a decline the number of young male workers in the public sector, whether newly recruited were women.
She says: "The reason is not new, it is the compulsory service and the flight of male employees who are under the age of 40 years, and all work competitions require that the applicant young man for the job, should be finished his military service, and this is difficult, so the number of girls has become more than it was before the crisis ".
Samiha’s talk about the preponderance of employment for females means that the staff map changed in terms of gender, and women have become the most dominant on the job, especially with the migration of many young graduates because of the war.
The private sector was not far from the public one, a manager of a private company in Damascus, spoke to Rozana, saying: "80% of my staff are female" Justifying that the situations of females are more stable than male, as well, women have become the breadwinners in the light of the migration of young men, joining the military service, or death due to the ongoing war in Syria, as he said.
The wages are "feminine"
Rozana tried to reach the number of employees by gender through "the Central Bureau of Statistics" which has not published any index since 2011, but the visitor to the governmental departments can distinguish the outweigh rate the number of females to males.
According to the National Observatory for the labor market, which was based on the central figures of Statistics about the monthly wage for workers in Syria in 2011, the highest wages in Syria were for female and which averaged 15.592 Syrian pounds, while the average of male wage amounted to 13.502 Syrian pounds, explaining that the low participation of women in employment from the category of low salaries, due to the concentration of a significant proportion of women workers in the public sector.
According to the index, the private sector comes in the last place in terms of the value of wages, with an average of female wages as 9.685 Syrian pounds, while the average of male wage amounted to 11.191 Syrian pounds.