Women’s Empowerment and Rational Awareness: Binding Commitment or Nonbinding Dreamy Texts?

Women’s Empowerment and Rational Awareness: Binding Commitment or Nonbinding Dreamy Texts?
 Omnia Taher Gadalla.
 Department of Commercial Law, Sharia and Law Branch, Faculty of Islamic and Arabic Studies (Female Students), Al-Azhar University, Cairo, Egypt
 E-mail: omnia.gadalla@azhar.edu.eg
 Abstract:
Egypt ranked 134th out of 146 countries in the 2023 Global Gender Gap Report published by the World Economic Forum. Empowering women and reducing the gender gap are among the 17 Sustainable Development Goals announced by the United Nations in 2015, with a target to achieve them by 2030 due to political and economic challenges faced by many countries. Although Egyptian law offers legal protection for women through various laws safeguarding their rights, numerous legal issues and humanitarian challenges confront women daily. This research highlights different forms of empowerment and the obstacles and barriers women face in achieving it, and it aims to shed light on the legal protections currently in place. It seeks to bridge the gap between theory and practice and between reality and aspirations, using comparative experiences as a guide along with a critical, analytical review of the status of women in various laws—all fundamentally linked to rational awareness. The study also seeks to answer whether rational awareness is a necessary precursor for empowering women or if empowering women itself leads to the desired societal awareness. Furthermore, it explores whether these successive legal texts provide effective protection for women or remain aspirational legal provisions, with the goal of linking them to rational awareness still far from realization.