Zainab Salbi on gender equality: ‘This is not the time to be polite. This is the time to call it’

Growing up in Iraq’s inner circle in the 1990s, Zainab Salbi lived under the shadow of Saddam Hussein. Her parents socialised with the dictator and she called him uncle.

A childhood in Iraq was, according to Salbi, “a context where beauty was dangerous”. Her mother taught her about feminism, and “at Saddam’s parties I was the only girl who did not wear makeup, only black dresses where all the others were wearing colourful taffeta”. Her father was the dictator’s pilot and her family were favoured by but terrified of him. Salbi believes her mother feared the dictator would rape her and eventually, when she was 19, Salbi was sent to the US for an arranged marriage.

Four years later, she set up Women for Women International prompted by her own experiences and by horror stories from the war in Yugoslavia. “She learned about the Bosnian genocide and women being mass raped and she decided to go to Bosnia to say ‘the world hasn’t forgotten about you’,” explains the organisation’s UK executive director, Brita Schmidt.

Women for Women International is now a leading women’s rights NGO operating in eight conflict-affected countries, from Afghanistan to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Schmidt, who worked for different women’s rights organisations before she was headhunted to set up the UK office eight years ago, says what makes it unique in the development sector is its sister sponsorship programme. Women (or men) around the world can sponsor a woman in a country affected by war. The “sisters” exchange letters, photographs and updates.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Zainab Salbi talking to children at a refugee camp in Iraq. Photograph: Zainab Salbi

This human-to-human connection fosters a real sense of solidarity, Schmidt says. “When you listen to the news and hear 200 people have been killed in Kabul, you think: ‘My sister’s in Kabul!’. Particularly now, in the era of Trump and Brexit, isn’t that even more important?” She had an emotional meeting with her “sister” in Rwanda earlier this year.

The organisation has helped 400,000 women since it started – 15,000 this year alone. It funds each woman to do a specially designed year-long programme that teaches her about her health and rights, improves her business skills and connects her to a network of other women. Monitoring and evaluation shows that women double their income through the course of the programme (from a low average of less than 50 cents a day) and, unexpectedly, 15% of graduates end up running for some kind of public office. “[That] speaks to the power of confidence,” says Schmidt. “And what happens when you bring women together.”

Salbi stepped away from the organisation in 2011. Schmidt, who has looked up to Salbi since she first read her autobiography, Between Two Worlds, in 2005, says it’s been hard for the organisation to adjust to life without her. “She has such incredible energy, charisma and clarity. She is focused on values rather than profit and greed.” But Salbi was in danger of burnout. “Zainab was the organisation and everyone wanted a piece of her,” says Schmidt. “It was important for her to focus on her own wellbeing.”

Salbi moved from humanitarian work into the media. She decided to start making TV shows after an Iraqi woman told her that a Turkish soap opera had given her the strength to leave her abusive husband. Salbi realised that she could reach more women more quickly through TV. “It’s the same mission in life, it’s women’s rights,” she says. “I just want to do it faster.”

Salbi’s first project was an Arab language TV show called Nida’a (the calling”), which was broadcast across the Middle East and north Africa and featured Bill Clinton and designer Donna Karan as guests. Her new programme, The Zainab Salbi Project, recently started showing on the Huffington Post and aims to present stories from the other’s perspective, with episodes on Islamophobia in the midwest of America and the third gender in India.

“That is fascinating for me,” she says about the mainstream acceptance of transgender women or hijras. “It coincides with a lot of the millennial discussions about the fluidity of gender.” The series is about exploring the complexity of cultures, she says, which can help bridge divides after Trump’s election.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Zainab Salbi speaking at Simmons Leadership Conference. Photograph: Carla Osberg

A week after the US election, Salbi spoke at a conference on women in leadership in Berlin. She told the audience of 400 businesswomen that the prevailing approach of success, typified by Hillary Clinton, is not working. “She is the best student in class, and they still punished her because she is a woman,” Salbi said.

Salbi says what the world needs now is for women, and men, to be in touch with the feminine parts of themselves. “We have all been living in a masculine world,” she says. “I honestly say screw that at the moment. I’m not going to deny any aspect of me just so I can succeed, or protect myself, in a man’s world.”

Part of that is stopping being polite, Salbi says. “A lot of the time women are polite when they’re addressing the issues, even to their boss when they make sexist remarks,” she says. “I feel like this it not the time to be polite. This is the time to call it.” Salbi fears that Trump legitimises every sexist boss, and that any similar behaviour needs to be identified by women around the world.

When she was in her 20s, Salbi was driven by anger and injustice. She used to get angry with her friends who didn’t care about inequality as much as her. But now she’s realised she has to engage in a different way “out of love rather than out of anger”. She’s realised that anger “eats my own system inside and then eats my relationships”.

Salbi is concerned by some of the language in the protests against Trump. “I worry that a lot of people are going to lead the opposition with anger,” she says. “And that is dangerous, because then we become the thing that we despise.” She thinks of anger as a match. It can be used to inspire change, but it shouldn’t get out of control and consume our whole lives.

The world is in crisis right now, Salbi believes. But from living and working in wars, she learned that with every crisis there is an opportunity. “It’s up to us to grab it,” she says. “Drop our self-righteousness, do our work, acknowledge where we have failed and move forward in a progressive way – or be silent and move backward.”

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