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Two French Muslim women have started a new website to assist hijabi women in finding employment.
While employees in the public sector are not permitted to wear religious symbols or hijab, those in the private sector are free to set their own regulations without stating whether they accept hijab or not.
Therefore, Yasmine Derrouaz, 21, and Hanya Cheikh, 19, developed JobHijab to relieve Muslim women from the frustration of applying for employment that would subsequently “force them to choose between their faith and their profession”.
The two came up with the concept for the new website after meeting several French Muslims who had been obliged to sacrifice their ideals in order to care for their families.
“We constantly receive messages from women who tell us they can’t stand having to take off their headscarf in front of their colleagues, and it breaks our hearts,” Cheikh told The Times. “It is a real humiliation.”
JobHijab exclusively covers firms that are known to be accepting of employees who wear religious symbols. They also clarify whether Muslim workers would be allowed time for daily prayers in the positions they feature.
Since launching their website in the summer, the duo has connected more than 100 Muslim women with jobs.
Listing new roles every day, but with more than 30,000 followers across Instagram, Twitter and TikTok they cannot keep up with demand, which had been “very high”.
Derrouaz and Cheikh think that by increasing the number of Muslim women in the workplace, they would be able to confront long-held biases.
“We are always reduced to our headscarf in France. People think we are incompetent or we are oppressed” said Derrouaz.
“It’s sad and it’s not true. That’s why we set up this website, to prove that we are not just our religion.”
In France, what Muslim women wear is a contentious issue. It outlawed hijab in public schools in 2004, and in 2010, it became the first European country to outlaw the burqa, which hides a woman’s face.
Currently, the majority of Bar Councils in France, including the largest in Paris, have internal regulations that prohibit religious insignia such as the headscarf.
According to a poll ordered by Poirret for this case, 56% of Bar Councils representing 75% of practitioners have prohibited religious insignia from being worn with the robe.
