She May Be The Most Unstoppable Scientist In The World
Dauqan is a woman scientist in what’s possibly the hardest place on Earth to be just a woman: Yemen.
The World Economic Forum ranks Yemen as the worst country for women’s rights. In Yemen, it’s illegal for women to just leave the house without permission from a male relative.
Even as a young girl, she was rebel. “I was a little naughty,” she says with a snicker.
Read her incredible story here
She liked breaking rules. And proving people wrong. So when her parents told her she might not have the smarts to go into science and engineering — like her dad — Eqbal thought: Watch me.
“I told my father, ‘I’ve heard a lot about scientists in chemistry. What is the difference between me and them? So I want to try,” she says.
And she did more than try. She crushed it.
She was the first among her friends to finish college. Then she got a scholarship to do her Ph.D. in biochemistry at the Universiti Kebansaan Malaysia, where she studied the nutritional properties of palm oil.
When little girls in the Middle East see photos of Eqbal as a chemist — wearing a head scarf, measuring pH — they don’t need to use their imagination to think: “I could be just like her. I could be a scientist.”
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