Lack of women’s rights in Qatar means even the privileged like me must do as men say

As people around the world watch videos of men smiling and waving flags outside Doha’s stadiums, they are only seeing one side of the story: what this country is like for a man. In fact, they probably aren’t seeing many women at all.

I’m a 23-year-old Qatari woman, and I don’t longingly look out towards the West and think, “I wish I wasn’t so oppressed.” Western experiences aren’t all the same. But since I was a child, I’ve come up against rules and restrictions that limit my freedom.

The moment that I realised I was being treated differently from my brothers was when I was three or four, and I came home from a day out with my family. My three brothers went with my father to the majlis, a room where he would entertain male visitors. I was not allowed in because I was a girl.

Masculinity in Qatar is tied to freedom: the ability to talk to people, to host and entertain. Even now, my younger brothers speak more fluently than I do and have better social skills, because talking to strangers was a daily thing for them.

Despite this, in many ways, I lead a much “freer” lifestyle than many women in the UK or in the US, because I come from a wealthy family with access to the best education. There are 330,000 native Qataris, compared with a migrant population of more than two million. Everyone in the ruling class is paid a monthly allowance by the government — it may be anything from £2,200 to about £6,000, depending on your status and gender. State employees are paid an additional bonus on top of their salaries.

Money affords me privileges that others can’t dream of. In Qatar we don’t have a nuclear family structure like in the West. If you’re born into privilege, there are other people involved. Our family had a driver, a housemaid, nannies and a gardener. My first language isn’t Arabic — it’s English, because that’s the language in which I spoke to my nanny, who was Sri Lankan. In many ways I was closer to her than my own mother. Girls go to school in Qatar. I attended a fee-paying school and studied the British curriculum, but education is free to all citizens.

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