Women are taking the driving seat in Cairo's cabs, says Mariam Fishere, who takes a ride "My husband never objected to my being a taxi driver. I can drive and be a wife. I also still have the time to drive the kids to wherever they want to go, but not using the cab of course," says Sherine Salem, one of the new woman drivers recently recruited by City Cab. Salem, in her 30s and veiled, dresses in a long skirt and shirt for her job as a taxi driver, and she also has a bachelors degree in physical education and works as a civil servant. If this seems like a heavy schedule, Salem adds that she has seldom had a lot of time to rest. Her life is spent between appointments and giving passengers rides, she says. Cairo's yellow cabs have become a way of life for people wanting to go short or longer distances on a hot sunny day, or who want a ride home without the kind of comments that other taxi drivers can make, especially when it comes to girls. In order to access this market, City Cab and Cairo Cab, both owned by the former company, now offer the kind of safe, calm ride characterised by closed windows and with the AC on. Today, the company is taking an additional step by recruiting more woman drivers. While woman drivers have been welcome since the company's launch in 2006, it previously recruited few women since women can have difficulties getting a professional licence in Egypt. Yet, according to Ayman Fathi, City Cab's director of recruitment, "we are facing a significant shortage of drivers, and partly for this reason we decided to try to recruit more women. We test out the women who apply for a job, and if they pass our tests we help them get their licence in coordination with the Traffic Authority." City Cab now has seven woman drivers and is working on increasing their number. When asked about the policies the company applies when recruiting women, Salem comments that she and her female colleagues are "free to wear whatever we want, and some of us wear the hijab." While the company is pursuing its policy of recruiting more woman drivers, City Cab's main offices at a garage near Ghamra Bridge in Cairo still seems dominated by men. "Women do not have an exclusive garage yet, but we are planning on finding one for them," Fathi says. "This is not because we want to separate them from the male drivers, but because this will grant them more privacy." "The seven woman drivers currently working for City Cab get their jobs from the company's call centre. I also give the company's number to women who get in my cab, since they may feel more comfortable riding with one of our woman drivers. Some 90 per cent of the clients are women, and I have never heard any comments from male passengers about being driven by a woman driver. The only time I ever had a complaint was from a girl who objected to being driven by a woman taxi driver," he adds. Working shifts at the company vary from one driver to the next, but women's shifts are mostly from seven in the morning to seven at night. Night shifts are not carried out by women. As Fathi and one of the woman drivers agreed, while it may be safer for the company's woman drivers not to work at night, the main reason why women work day shifts is because of their domestic duties. According to Hoda Zakaria, a sociologist, "there is nothing new about having female taxi drivers. They have been out on the streets for more than 10 years, and there are many women who have the determination and willpower to cope with the difficulties that can come from the job." "When we talk about women working in such jobs, our attention tends to focus on middle-class women, haramlek women, but rural women have long been part of the job market," Zakaria said, adding that the way in which history is taught still tends to hide the fact that many women in the past worked in jobs now sometimes considered as belonging to men. "Latifa Al-Nady was one of the first Egyptian pilots in the 1930s, for example, and she taught many men their jobs," Zakaria said, underlining the fact that the present emphasis on recruiting more women in such jobs could be useful publicity for women in such roles. However, she says, such work can be hard for women, "especially nowadays with all the social conflicts going on. However, if these women are able to make a success of such roles, they will be seen as normal by society." Concerning the reactions of male drivers to their new colleagues' arrival on the scene, Fathi makes it clear that strict rules govern interactions in the work place. "Respect is expected of everyone regardless of sex," he says. "I am thrilled to be working with women, and I find them more punctual, responsible and careful with the cars than men are. No woman has had an accident in any of our cars thus far, though of course we cannot generalise from this experience," he adds with a smile. As for public opinion, Mustafa Medhat, one of Cairo's black-and-white taxi drivers, laughs at the idea of seeing a woman driving a cab. "It's just impossible," Medhat said. "The streets are extremely stressful, and women wouldn't be able to handle the job. They wouldn't know how to deal with a client if they were harassed, and anyway women can't drive well, and they will make the standard of driving in Cairo worse than it already is," he said. Nevertheless, despite such jokes about women's driving, City Cab is looking forward to expanding the number of woman drivers that it employs. Could this be part of a bet with the public that older perceptions of woman drivers are unfair, one wonders.
