Oral History Archive Samar Assem

This is an interview with feminist entrepreneur Samar Assem, co-founder of GTTDUN Consultancy and marketing director at a leading venture capital fund in the Middle East and the USA. Samar spoke at length about her extensive professional background and her pioneering work supporting new businesses owned by women and young women entrepreneurs. She also discussed the most serious challenges women entrepreneurs face as well as the challenges brought on by the novel coronavirus to the business scene in Egypt.

Samar graduated from the German University in Cairo (GUC) in 2009, double majoring in marketing and strategic planning. Since then, she has worked in marketing nonstop and in various companies, until she was able to launch two companies, while keeping her job as an incubator for new entrepreneurs. Samar has always been preoccupied with challenges that face fresh graduates from Egyptian universities at the job market. She emphasized the fact that graduates of universities from local universities (away from Cairo, the center) face other sets of challenges as well. This is one of the reasons why she attempts to give women more space, whether they are entrepreneurs, new employees, or leaders in their work. In 2021, she was chosen as one of Agora UN Women’s youth development advocates.

Samar talks about her partnership with her sister, Heba Assem, specifically their pioneering initiative in training women university graduates and giving them more experience. Heba manages several activities and works as a consultant to the Egyptian government in a development project, so both sisters take turns in shouldering the responsibility of managing their companies. For instance, one of them would free herself up to manage a company, while the other delivers other unrelated consultations for a different entity. Samar and Heba divide their tasks based on their experience, so Samar oversees the provision of strategic consultations, without prejudice to her other responsibilities, be it financial, legal, or otherwise. Samar is also grateful to her family, especially her mother for supporting her and her sister’s academic endeavors and career. She says she was always encouraging them to excel in their education, at home, or in sports and other activities they were doing. Her mother fostered an environment of support and care, where they were encouraged to discover their own interests and passions. As for their relationship to each other and to others, they were always encouraged to share, and their father was their role model when it comes to this.

As for her career, Samar says she faced many challenges related to her gender at work. For instance, she would not be promoted or commended for her performance in comparison to men despite her excellent work because she is a woman. She was even told that she is a woman, who may marry and be overwhelmed with domestic duties, so that would make her unreliable in the workplace. She was also told that she got certain jobs because she “looks good,” not because of her excellent performance. Another company withdrew its job offer to her because she was engaged to be married, as they were worried she would quit her job as a result. Since she was in her twenties, she learned not to accept a job offer in a company where the professional environment does not foster gender equality. This is because Samar’s personal experience is inseparable from the reality of women in general, who often lack the necessary funding due to their gender, even though 90% of startups that fail are led by men. When Samar and Heba started their two companies, they never tried to seek funding so as not to face that kind of discrimination, which Samar knew about thanks to her position at a venture capital fund. However, Samar notes that the adoption of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals by major financial institutions and US Silicon Valley companies has a positive impact on directing more funding to women entrepreneurs. These institutions and companies require investment funds and business incubators to allocate 25% of their funding to women, and this is what is behind the partial change in this attitude toward women. Although Samar has moved away from this kind of funding, patterns of microaggression such as delaying the financial compensations her two companies are entitled to or not taking her opinion during the decision-making process face her from time to time.

Women passionate about innovation start facing difficulties once they graduate, especially those located outside Cairo. Backward social traditions are also an impediment faced by women, since women are often not rewarded for their excellent performance, which happened to Samar in the beginning of her career. The centralization of funding is also problematic, as most funds go to entrepreneurs based in Cairo, which is unfair for other entrepreneurs located away from the center. Gaining government funding is difficult as it has too many requirements and is focused on specific sectors and not others. Going back to the private sector, it cannot fund more than five or six economic sectors, and educational projects are not considered a priority for that kind of funding. For example, the past few years have witnessed an interest in investing in e-marketing among companies and funds, followed by a newfound interest in electronic payments. These limited sectors constitute a problem for both men and women entrepreneurs. Finally, the patriarchy is also a problem, and it could lead to women themselves being misogynistic, as they sometimes prefer men as superiors to women in the workplace.

Samar believes that women and men do not each excel at certain fields and not others. On the contrary, women can innovate in the fields of education, tech, e-commerce, blockchain and sustainable development. It is not true that women only work in handicrafts. When asked about the scarcity of women programmers and the problem that most women opt for careers in graphic design instead, she said that this may be due to the long working hours that programmers have to do and some companies’ corporate culture, which prevents women from assuming leadership positions in programming. Some multinational companies even specify the “gender” of the potential candidate when hiring.

Samar asserts that there are positive and negative consequences to the novel coronavirus pandemic. The digital transformation that came with the pandemic allowed more women to participate in trainings without worrying about long commutes. Through their initiative, Samar and her sister managed to deliver their training to graduates of technical institutes below the university level. These training courses were also easily and recorded and translated into sign language. Many women who started working from home became even more productive and more capable of developing their skills through remote learning. However, 30% of Egyptian women lost their jobs, based on UN estimates, and both men and women were laid off as a result of the economic recession that came with the pandemic.