In 1984, Nora Frenkiel coined the term glass ceiling: "Women have reached a certain point — I call it the glass ceiling. They're in the top of middle management and they're stopping and getting stuck."

"The glass ceiling is the ability to visualize getting to the top but not reaching there. In Pakistan for female entrepreneurs, you can neither see what it looks like nor aspire to be something you cannot imagine," Maria Umar says. "It’s more of a cement ceiling here in our case in Pakistan."

Umar is challenging the cement ceiling as an international entrepreneur and a key player in Pakistan's burgeoning tech scene. She is revered as one of the trailblazers in the female entrepreneurial revolution, and focuses her efforts on furthering work opportunities for women in Pakistan.

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Before becoming an entrepreneur, Umar was a full-time teacher. She quit after her job refused her maternity leave and subsequently began writing for a woman she found through Rozee.pk, Pakistan's premiere job portal. The money was good — almost double what she made as a teacher — but when Umar discovered her employer's oDesk profile, she realized she could make even more money by contracting with clients directly.

She set up her own oDesk account and began taking on extra jobs and outsourcing them. At first she gave the jobs to her nieces, then to their friends, and eventually to their classmates, until she realized that she had developed a small content-creation business.

Today, this company is called The Women's Digital League, an IT-solution company that trains rural Pakistani women in micro online tasks, from ghost-writing to social media management.

Ovidiu Bujorean is the Senior Manager of the GIST Initiative, which supports entrepreneurship in the Middle East, Asia and Africa. He met Umar after she won a GIST business plan competition, and recognized her ability immediately. "She is extremely passionate and persistent," he says of Umar. "She’s also very committed to her mission of helping female entrepreneurs find job opportunities. Even if she hits a wall, she will learn her way over, under or through that wall."

As a female entrepreneur working in a male-dominated IT-field, there is no shortage of walls for Umar to break through.

The challenges women face while trying to secure an education in Pakistan are significant. Last year, UNESCO reported that 62% of girls in Pakistan between seven and 15 years old have never spent time in a classroom. Violence against girls pursuing an education has increased since the alleged Taliban attack against Malala Yousafzai in October of last year.

But the country's education emergency is only the beginning of a larger problem.

According to the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics, only 14.3% of Pakistani women currently participate in the labor force.

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"Girls themselves are becoming more empowered and asking for their right to [education]," Umar says. "Unfortunately not very many actually utilize that education in the formal sector..."Families discourage girls from working outside due to [the] security situation and lack of social acceptance."

Social media has played an integral role in helping WDL provide work-opportunities for women who otherwise may be unable to work.

Umar finds the majority of WDL freelancers through social media. She attaches hashtags like #homebasedwork, #writerneeded, #jobopportunities and #pakistan to tweet advertising job opportunities, and receives a new CV almost daily.

"There are women that I’ve known for the past three years, and very closely through social media," says Umar, "through Twitter, through Facebook pages and yes, through LinkedIn too."

Umar estimates that more than 80% of her company's business comes through LinkedIn referrals, largely because of the effort she's put into cultivating complimentary reviews. “If you check, even now I don’t have my formal website up,” she says, “I’ve never needed to. When people come and ask me, ‘I’ve heard that you do this, how can we find out more about it?’ I just say well, go to my LinkedIn page.”

Umar's leveraging of her LinkedIn referrals was impressive enough to catch the attention of Alec Ross, the former Senior Advisor for Innovation to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

"The idea of a woman in one of the Waziristans working on an IT micro tasking is a very powerful affirmation of the platform," he said. Ross remembers being struck by Umar's dedication to helping other women find work. "I firmly believe that we need to empower women in the marketplace. There's so much insecurity brought on by men. This woman was empowering dozens of other women."

Umar recently announced that she is expanding WDL into The Digital League, a company that offers digital solutions to individuals and corporate clients.

"We decided we needed to include the men as well," she says, noting that WDL will remain a subsidiary of TDL. "Why just Pakistan? We are now expanding it to the world."

Image courtesy of Thunderbird.edu