The saga of the Ever Given was a beautiful one while it lasted—is there anything funnier than a large boat getting stuck in the narrow Suez Canal?—but it’s had lasting supply chain effects that are pretty miserable. And that’s not even as bad as the flack that one woman—Marwa Elselehdar—is getting for a role
she didn’t even play in the event.
Elselehdar, 29, is Egypt’s first-ever female ship captain, and when the Ever Given blocked the Suez Canal, she realized that people were placing her at the center of the fiasco. People were using social media to share a doctored screenshot of an Arab Times headline that claimed she was at the helm of the ship at the time it was stuck. It appeared that the headline had been altered from a March 22
profile of Elselehdar praising her successes. You can see the doctored headline
here.
The news came as a shock to Elselehdar, who was working as a first mate on the Aida IV vessel near Alexandria, which is hundreds of miles away.
And that wasn’t all. People began making Twitter accounts with her name claiming responsibility and furthers spreading the false rumors.
“I felt that I might be targeted maybe because I’m a successful female in this field or because I’m Egyptian, but I’m not sure,” she told
the BBC this weekend.
As you can imagine, piloting a ship isn’t exactly a realm rife with equality. The
International Maritime Organization notes that only two percent of the world’s seafarers are women—and 94 percent of
those women work in the cruise industry.
So, it makes sense, unfortunately, that Elselehdar has received backlash for her very presence. She was the first woman to enroll in Egypt’s naval academy and captained the Aida IV when it was the very first vessel to traverse the newly-expanded Suez Canal in 2015.
jalopnik.com
