Asia Joumaa is a Lebanese web developer at the Beirut-based internet company Pixel38 and the top student to graduate from the second training cycle of SE Factory, an intensive coding bootcamp that provides young people with the technical skills they need to land jobs in the Lebanese digital sector — a space dominated by men from the top down of the glassy ceiling, like every tech ecosystem across the globe. “I’ve always wanted to work as a web developer, and then I got into SE Factory, which helped me get there,” shares Joumaa. “There’s a lot of young women who want to get into tech here in Lebanon.” Indeed there are.

At Beirut Digital District (BDD), a bustling tech hub in Lebanon’s capital that provides space and support services to 70 other companies (including SE Factory), the gender ratio is 55 percent women to 45 percent male. At the executive level, the ratio is 80 percent men to 20 percent women. But let’s back up for a second. The fact that more women are holding positions within BDD’s creative tech cluster, which is home to approximately 1,300 employees overall, is a bright anomaly, as there aren’t known tech scenes in the Western world where women outnumber men. In the U.S., the average percentage of women working in the tech industry is 30 percent, while women make up 59 percent of the country’s workforce. Meanwhile in the U.K., the percentage of women working in tech registers at 17 percent — lower than the number of women working in Parliament.

At this moment in time, embracing women in tech at any level should be non-negotiable for any business and government that intends to thrive. This isn’t simply because there is a growing, global crusade of groups championing female entrepreneurs. And it’s not because we’re not waiting 118 years for gender equality to finally transpire — because we’re not, by the way. It’s because women represent the largest market opportunity in the world, as they control $20 trillion in consumer spending a year. According to the 2016 World Economic Forum Global Gender Gap Report, Lebanon’s ranking for women’s rights is 135 out of 144. With more players in Lebanon’s digital network contributing to the employment and success of women, that position could and will hopefully change for the better. If the gender trend at BDD continues to expand beyond that community, and if more women in the country begin to pursue founder and executive roles, there’s hope for women to become a larger part of Lebanon’s economy.

 

As with any social movement, young people are the key to change and to cultivating new ideologies. Mohammad Rabah, general manager at ZRE, the developer of BDD, says the talent graduating from Lebanon’s universities is the main ingredient that led to the creation of BDD and its female workforce. It’s worth noting that Lebanon has one of the top education systems in the world. “I believe of the graduating talents you have more males traveling outside Lebanon continuing either their studies or their work at regional or international locations, whereas with females you have a higher percentage that stay within Lebanon to work with local companies,” says Rabah.

In three recent trips to Lebanon, I’ve interviewed a number of women like Joumaa — determined and driven individuals who have their dreams in front of them — despite having to deal with the daily challenges of living in a country known for consistent power outages, notoriously slow internet and hosting more than one million Syrian refugees.

 

From a founder perspective, the hurdles don’t end there. In many countries, a person can quickly register a business online for as little $70. However, in Lebanon the process may take weeks and costs thousands of dollars.

 

Rather than view these issues as obstacles, many of the entrepreneurs in Lebanon use them to inform the creation of solutions that can serve others regionally and globally.

 

Case in point: Nadine Haram is the co-founder of Proximie, an AR platform that allows virtual surgical training to take place. The technology has been used to aid surgeons in conflict zones, including Gaza, Syria and Iraq.

 

A graduate of the U.K. Lebanon Tech Hub (UKLTH), an accelerator program based at BDD and focused on helping startups scale internationally, Proximie was co-founded by Talal Ali Ahmad, and recently signed Yale as a new partner.

 

 

 

“I think Lebanon’s strength has always been its human resource, it’s brain power — be it in healthcare, tech, engineering, space, education or finance,” says Haram. “If you look globally to any of these industries, Lebanon always has a few shining examples there. More specifically this is also the case for women, with education and college degrees being a very big part of our culture.”

 

Some other women-led successes that have come out of UKLTH include the healthtech product Sensio Air, co-founded by Eve Tamraz and Cyrille Najjar, edtech startup Play My Way, co-founded by Salma Jawhar and Dr. Ahmad Hammoud, and MakerBrane, a creative platform for designing and building toys, co-founded by Sabine de Maussion and Ayssar Arida.

 

Outside of UKLTH, the password protection provider Myki, co-founded by Priscilla Elora Sharuk and Antoine Vincent Jebara, is an alumnus of the TechCrunch Disrupt SF battlefield.

 

Three years ago, funding for Lebanese startups came mainly from angel investments. However, this has changed since the introduction of the Circular 331 initiative, which has made available $400 million for investment in the knowledge economy directly by banks or venture capital funds.

 

“Because of the war, Lebanon was suffering a brain drain, and I think by invigorating and investing in the tech industry the government has made a huge impact on the current generation and generations to come,” says Haram. “Women are encouraged to be entrepreneurs, and they are celebrated for their success. Furthermore, the financial investment by Circular 331 has allowed these women to take their amazing ideas through to fruition.”

 

Staying power takes action

 

Eighty-five kilometers north of Beirut, the city of Tripoli is also seeing its own tech community develop, and women are at the helm.

 

Najwa Sahmarani and Fadi Mikati, co-founders of the Tripoli Entrepreneurs Club (TEC), are making sure of that. In three years, their organization has run startup workshops and two rounds of pre-acceleration programs.

 

While participating in a delegation by the Aspen Institute called Fringe Diplomacy in November of last year, I visited TEC. As I absorbed the club’s zen energy and communal atmosphere, it was hard to digest that not long ago violence flooded the area, caused by sectarian clashes between rival neighborhoods.

 

“The height of the terror was two years back,” says Sahmarani. “When we started TEC it was just in the middle of it happening, and this is why we have this big community. Because the young people, the young professionals who are living here, saw it as a way to actually do something for this community, and create a different image of what’s happening. To make it liveable, actually.”