Editor's Note: This is the fifth story in a six-week series focused on women and work in patriarchal nations in the Middle East. Read other stories in the series.



Before recipe website, Shahiya, was snapped up by Japanese site, Cookpad, for $13.5m in 2014, the Beirut-based start-up had to explain itself over and over again. The mostly male investors needed to be swayed on more than just the usual.

They needed to be convinced there was value in funding a company mainly used by housewives.

“We had the challenge of perception,” said Shahiya CEO and co-founder Hala Labaki. “The decision-makers didn’t cook, even the few women (venture capitalists) didn’t, so they couldn’t relate. For some, the idea of food culture is that it’s for women, and you’re put into a category.”

Labaki said the fact that her two business partners are men probably went a long way towards convincing investors since men tend to be taken more seriously in the Middle East then women in business.

Shahiya is a success story for a woman-led business in the Middle East. Its user base now has 3.5 million unique visitors per month, 40% of which are from Saudi Arabia. There are 15,000 published recipes, making it the largest Arabic language digital library for recipes.

Lebanon’s relatively open society and economy mean women have had more opportunities here than elsewhere in the region. But, growing a business in the Middle East is never easy, particularly for women. Those who do succeed must meet the challenges of expanding their companies in to socially conservative countries — a step before expanding internationally — seek funding from largely male firms who are sometimes averse to dealing with women and find ways to make sure they are taken seriously by male colleagues.

Connections, rather than creativity, smarts and technical skills, can make the difference between success and failure, with networking a key ingredient to growing a business, says Dima Dabbous, Beirut-based consultant on media and gender at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation. But that can be a challenge. Even in Lebanon women are often part of a small minority at their firms and like elsewhere in the world may not be invited to casual social functions outside of work. The few women’s networking groups that exist tend to be poorly-developed and not very active, Dabbous said.

“Men already have the structure in place. Men meet outside of working hours, which automatically excludes women from deals struck outside of work. [With women] there’s too much weight put on individual effort,” said Dabbous. “I don’t think men make it on their own, so why should women do it on their own?”