Women are not a minority

There is a particular exhaustion familiar to many Syrian women: the quiet, cumulative fatigue of having to justify one’s presence in public life. It’s not always explicit, and not always demanded, but it’s there. You carry the argument before it is even made. 

Then, at the end of a long day, you switch on the television to watch a discussion about the forthcoming People’s Assembly – and hear, once again, the well-worn assurances: “There is no need to worry about women, they will be included”.

Really?

Such language may sound benign, even reassuring. Yet it points towards what might be called the manufacturing of a minority. A large social group is gradually confined to a position of limited influence through a collection of discourse, law, and social relations.

The process often begins with what appears to be a positive moment: reassurance. The very words uttered by guests on that television programme.

This logic is not new in the Syrian context. It was deployed repeatedly during the years of the revolution, when the “majority” was asked to offer guarantees to religious minorities – ostensibly to build trust and calm fears. In that fraught political moment, such language seemed understandable. Yet it also entrenched a particular hierarchy: those who possess power reassure; those who are reassured are, by definition, vulnerable, in need of protection. 

This sort of rhetoric shapes the boundaries of participation in public life. Reassurance relocates women from the position of partner to that of recipient, and from actor to object of concern. Even when well-intentioned, it is not neutral. Over time, repeated often enough, this framing hardens into common sense. It begins to feel natural to speak of women as a group to be “included” or “protected,” rather than as an equal component of the political and social order.

Women, of course, are not a numerical minority. They constitute half of Syria’s population. But what, precisely, defines a minority? Is it simply a matter of arithmetic? Or is it, rather, a political and social condition that arises when a group is systematically treated as unequal within a given society?

By this measure, Syrian women offer perhaps the clearest example of how a majority can be rendered a minority. A minority, in this sense, is not a question of size, but of access: to power, to rights, to representation. It is a condition of constraint, exclusion, and diminished influence relative to a dominant group.

During that same television discussion, a woman in the audience posed a simple question: “If women are half of society, why do they need someone to decide how they participate?”

The response came, predictably, in the form of a sneer: “Aren’t you the ones always demanding quotas? Make up your mind!”

Here lies a familiar confusion. The rejection of being treated as a minority is immediately countered by invoking quotas as though the two positions were contradictory. In fact, quotas do not rest on the assumption that women are a minority. They acknowledge something else entirely: a structural imbalance in access to decision-making.

A quota is not compensation for a lack of women. It is a corrective for barriers embedded within the system itself. The occasional use of quotas as a substitute for deeper reform is a cosmetic gesture that allows political systems to appear inclusive while leaving their underlying logic of exclusion untouched.

The good news – if it can be called that – is that minority status is neither fixed nor inevitable. It is produced politically and socially, and can therefore be dismantled in the same way. History offers countless examples of marginalised groups that have moved from the periphery to full participation in public life.

Change does not begin in a single place. It emerges across several interconnected arenas, and is driven, above all, by the ability of those affected to organise, to articulate demands, and to assert their presence in the public sphere. Collective organisation therefore, is what compels movement across all the rest.

The law is one such arena. Where legal frameworks remain silent on discrimination – or worse, permit it – they are not neutral. They are complicit in reproducing inequality.

Political representation is another. Not the token presence of a handful of women in official photographs or closed lists, but real participation in decision-making: in setting priorities, shaping policy, and exercising influence.

Economic equality, too, is indispensable. It is difficult to speak of meaningful public participation in the presence of economic dependency, unequal employment opportunities, persistent wage gaps, or fragile social protections.

Beyond all this lies culture, the slowest yet most profound terrain of change. Laws may be amended, but if the language remains the same, the jokes the same, the stereotypes the same, and the expectations unchanged, then little of substance has changed.

None of these arenas operates in isolation. Each shapes and is shaped by the others. Change, when it comes, is forced into being through sustained pressure from below. It is rarely granted from above.