I’m really excited about this week’s edition. This is the first interview in this newsletter and my interviewee is a great fit for what I want to highlight — the value of educating a woman. I spoke with Sobia Rafiq, 33, who I read about in this story, co-founder of Sensing Local, an urban planning firm in Bangalore, India.
Sobia and I share a home city. She’s also Muslim and attended the same all-girls school that I did. Our conversation was about how much needs to change in many Indian families to make education a priority for women. I’m aware that plenty of what we’ll cover here isn’t everyone’s reality. In fact, some of it might seem downright unbelievable, even for many Indians. But that’s the point of this interview: to make clear how many women still struggle with such basics which prevent them from living a full life on their terms.
Even today, many South Asian women like Sobia, in different parts of the world, are under enormous pressure from their families to enter into an arranged marriage — where a girl and boy intended for marriage are introduced to each other through their families — often at the expense of the woman’s education and career.
For some background, Sobia qualified as an architect in India before getting a master’s degree in city design and social science from the London School of Economics. The first in her family to leave home to continue an education, Sobia tells me about what her struggles were, what helped her get past them and what she’s doing in her career at the moment.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. Everything in brackets is either my opinion or supporting information for context.
Hi Sobia. Please tell me about your background and how it shaped where you have got to in your career.
My mother was the first generation to go to college in my family. She got an MBA although she didn’t have a chance to use it. She got married midway through the programme and her father-in-law said women in the family don’t work so that terminated my mother’s career. My father qualified as an engineer.
I grew up in a large family, with lots of cousins and aunts and uncles. I always wanted to move away from home to continue my education, either in medicine or architecture. I wanted to build my own identity. When I was accepted to Manipal School of Architecture and Planning (about 400 km from Bangalore), we had to make a decision almost overnight. My grandfather (mother’s father) convinced my father this was a great opportunity for me. He had also encouraged my mother to enroll and then complete her MBA.
Moving to Manipal really helped. My best friend here was from an Indian family where education was the first priority. Many Indian Muslims can be so insular (which only reinforces stereotypes). We tend to make friends only with other families like us. Girls are sent to all-girls schools. I hadn’t sat in an autorickshaw until I went to Manipal. Even when I did an internship, there was a car and driver waiting outside the office to take me home. When you’re raised so sheltered and have such little interaction with the outside world, what do you know?
Educating a girl (especially in India and even among many affluent, urban families) is often done because society thinks it’s necessary. Educating a woman to build a career is still an exception.
Even in my case, it was so contradictory because my father insisted I do well in school but when the time came, he was willing to compromise everything to see me married. I saw many smart, talented women in my family married very young, some of whom are still in terrible marriages. In one instance, the girl was only allowed to enroll in higher education under the condition she would agree to an arranged marriage as soon her family found a suitable match. This happened in the first year of the programme and she dropped out.
What are your thoughts about this?
I think it’s fine if a woman does want to get married young as long as that’s her choice. But a 17 or 18-year-old cannot be expected to make that choice.
This is the trick of sorts that’s used by so many families to justify an arranged marriage. Does someone so young have the ability to make that choice for themselves or to understand what the decision means for their life? And what have the adults in their life done to support them to make an informed decision? I know of a woman in my family who went through three failed marriages in her early 20s until she finally said, I want to finish my education.
It is so easy to get bogged down by what societal expectations are that you’re no longer really listening to what the person wants. As a parent, it’s so easy to say, “I know what’s best for you.”
I know this can be such a complex system to navigate. What helped you?
I don't know where it came from but I knew from when I was very young, I didn’t want to blame anyone for how my life turned out.
I think my education played a huge role in the life I have today because it guided my decision of what I studied, who I married.
My father has many friends from outside the Muslim community who are third and fourth-generation educated in their families and I make a point of mentioning this because it played such a huge role in me negotiating things in my life.
I also had a very strong support system in two other cousins, also women, who shared my mindset. You can feel like an outsider in your own family. Three of us wanted to get an education and not just for the sake of it, didn’t want to get married young, we wanted to get into good universities. Knowing that someone understands you, that I could have these conversations with them and figure next steps together was a big source of solace.
Tell me a little about what you do now.
When I finished training as an architect, I joined a great firm. But I remember thinking, “This can’t be it.” So I started working alongside with a nonprofit in rural housing. It was during one week when I had to source a shower panel for a client which cost about Rs. 1 lakh (approx. £1000 or $1400) and build an entire house for Rs. 1 lakh that I decided I didn’t want to do commercial architecture.
The process to apply for a master’s was so difficult. I did it undercover, saving up money for the application fees. And when I was accepted to LSE, no one in my extended family congratulated me. My father was really happy and so proud of me. I mean, this is one of the best schools in the world. But a relative said to him at the time, something to the effect of, “You’ve lost control of your daughter. It’s all downhill from here.”
When I came back to India from the UK, I realised there wasn’t much of a space for urban planning. So I set up Sensing Local as an experiment, which is about five years old now. We’ve worked on projects like a clear bilingual signage system for one of Bangalore’s biggest public parks and the public art project (linked above, in the introduction).
I want to simplify urban planning, especially in Indian cities, where it can’t be a specialised job. Whether that’s setting up a website or designing a park, the philosophy of participation is very important.
And I want to support decentralisation because this problem is so big. You can’t solve it on your own. We need more people working on this.
When there’s unrest or a disaster — children’s education is among the first to take a hit. Girls suffer disproportionately. We’ve seen this happen again and again and again. Even during this pandemic, school closures that are keeping kids out of classrooms and a yawning digital divide, especially among children from low-income backgrounds, has been hotly debated.
This story highlights how the problem is compounded for girls.
Malala is the poster child of this problem. She’s also an example of how education is more effective against extremism underpinned by patriarchy than all the wars and force money can buy as Nick Kristof of The New York Times writes in his column — a theory that is both groundbreaking and breathtaking. If you don’t/can’t read the full story, let these lines stay with you:
“Education is an imperfect weapon against extremism, but it helps. It works through some combination of opening minds, building a middle class, giving women a greater voice in society and reducing population growth and thus a destabilizing “youth bulge” in the population.”
Every now and then, I come across a story of the unimaginable odds some students brave to get an education, like this one in the NYT. There’s so much I take for granted.
I’m also always amazed at the far-reaching effects of education. Did you know that experts are now deducing that education levels could determine how likely someone is to take the vaccine?
And it’s not the greatest book I’ve read but still riveting is Tara Westover’s, Educated. Mildly bizarre, it’s one woman’s story of figuring out who she is and what she wants, torn between her unconventional, very religious family and the modern world. The relationship between how religiously observant a family is and how this affects women’s education is a curious one.
In Women Wins this Week
Samoa, which if you’re already reaching for a map like I was and is between Hawaii and New Zealand (yes, that’s possible), got its first female prime minister. Except her opponent refused to step down and locked her out of parliament. Awkward. So being the classy lady she is, Fiame Naomi Mata'afa took her oath in a tent set up in the gardens.
Maya Wiley and Dianne Morales are women of colour running for mayor of New York City. Can you believe someplace as liberal and global as New York has never had a woman lead it?
And Simone Biles broke another record. Again. Casual.
I’ve finished watching Superstore (for now) and it’s been so great to see a woman of colour in a leading role. No ceremony, no bells and whistles. Just a straightforward story with America Ferrera playing the lead and it’s wonderful.
If we want a more gender-equal world, education is (partly) an elegant solution. Did you know, for every additional year that a girl spends in secondary education, she will earn up to 19% more and reinvest 90% of these earnings back into her family. This also reduces infant mortality rates by up to 10%.
Apart from the obvious benefits like confidence and the opportunity to become financially independent, education gives women, in particular, the tools to aspire for a life beyond what they have been born into, to be more than what they’re “supposed” to, expected to. Education allows women to dream of a life beyond being someone’s daughter, wife and mother.
Sometimes this is enough to transform a woman’s life, her family, the larger community she’s a part of.
In other words, almost always educating a woman can change the world.
xx
AA