Equality at Work

The woman I’d like to talk about is a family friend called Gulnora, who is a civil engineer and now heads a construction company in Tashkent that specialises in bridges and highways. Construction engineering is still very much a male-dominated field in Uzbekistan; when she graduated in the late 1990s, she was one of only three women in her year. Her early career was, by her own account, extremely difficult. She was regularly assumed to be a secretary at meetings, and site workers sometimes refused to take instructions from her. Rather than becoming discouraged, she focused on becoming technically outstanding — she was known for checking every calculation twice — and gradually earned respect through results. In 2010, she co-founded her own company, which has since completed several major infrastructure projects, including a bridge that I cross most days. Beyond her technical achievements, she has deliberately used her position to change the industry. Her company runs a scholarship for female engineering students, and nearly a third of her engineers are now women, far above the industry average. I think her achievements matter on several levels. Most directly, she has built things that thousands of people use every day. But symbolically, she has expanded what young women see as possible; my cousin chose engineering specifically after hearing her speak at a school career day. And finally, she has demonstrated, through her company’s success, that diversity isn’t a matter of charity — it simply improves the quality of the work. That combination of personal excellence and structural change is, to me, what genuine leadership looks like.

Shaxs → to‘siqlar → strategiya → yutuqlar → tuzilmaviy o‘zgarish → ahamiyati (amaliy, ramziy, iqtisodiy).