'Asked to introduce male relatives': Taliban look to remove women from public sector roles

The return of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan was never good news for the country’s women population. Over the years, the Taliban were infamous for their oppressive rules for women and the new regime is trying to implement similar restrictions once again. The finance ministry of the country has asked its female employees to nominate a male relative to work in their place. The women employees were earlier barred from working in public sector jobs and this announcement reasserted the position taken by the government. According to The Guardian, the Taliban sent the female employees home soon after taking power last year and have been paying reduced salaries.

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This is the latest decision taken by the Taliban regime which is a painful reminder of how things were in Afghanistan during the early 2000s. In May, the government once again passed a decree on women’s clothing and made it mandatory for male “guardians” to accompany women in public.

An employee of the Afghanistan finance ministry, on the condition of anonymity confirmed the developments to The Guardian and said that the justification given for the exclusion was that the “workload in the office has increased and they need to hire a man instead of us”.

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 “I was asked to introduce a male family member to replace me at the ministry, so I could be dismissed from the job. How can I easily introduce someone else to replace me? Would he be able to work as efficiently as I have for so many years?” she said according to The Guardian.

It has been a tough period of time for Afghanistan as the country was rocked by a number of earthquakes and according to the United Nations, a huge portion of its population is currently facing acute hunger after farming was disrupted by the civil war and natural disasters.