From Al-Jazeera
![Nadia Ahmad has encouraged six other women to acquire government-issued taxi licenses [Abed al-Qaisi/Al Jazeera]](http://www.aljazeera.com/mritems/imagecache/mbdxxlarge/mritems/Images/2015/8/13/155428785b7b4331a74750bbb784f26d_18.jpg)
Nadia Ahmad is planning to start her own fleet of taxis in the occupied West Bank – driven by women, for women.
Hebron, occupied West Bank – Nadia Ahmad prefers to drive in manual. She laughs, motioning with one hand as if she is changing gears while the other one rests on an imaginary wheel.
Ahmad has been preoccupied with cars since she was a young girl, but she never thought she would end up making a living out of her love for being behind the wheel.
For the past two years, Ahmad has been driving a taxi through the streets of Hebron in the southern occupied West Bank.
While she never planned to make a political statement with her career, there is no getting around it: Ahmad is believed to be the only female taxi driver in all of Palestine.
Her floral-printed mauve headscarf and long black abaya stand out among the rows of bare male elbows poking out of the drivers’ windows in the bustling city of Hebron.
She says that her husband, a professor of information technology at a local university, never challenged her dream of driving a taxi – but many others in the community were not as open to her unusual job choice.
“In the beginning, there was a lot of gossip. When my brother heard other drivers talking about me, about ‘that woman who drives a taxi’, he came home and was furious and demanded I stop at once,” Ahmad told Al Jazeera.
Ahmad stopped driving for several months after that, but her husband urged her to continue.
Women account for only one-fifth of the workforce in the occupied West Bank, and many take on the roles traditionally seen as “female”, such as teaching, nursing, or cleaning. Mothers who work while their children are home from school are sometimes frowned upon.
Nahid Abu Taima, who teaches a course on feminism in the media at Birzeit University, told Al Jazeera that women like Ahmad are trailblazers in Palestine, paving the way for an equal society.
“There’s another woman like [Ahmad] in Gaza. She’s a fisherwoman, I think. She’s surely the only woman doing that job,” Abu Taima said. “It’s not easy, but these women are opening doors for other women to start work – not just in general, but in fields previously impossible. We will look back and see [that] these women who made the first jump into ‘male’ fields helped push us towards equality.”
