An Evening with Manal al-Sharif
Event description
Manal al-Sharif will be sharing her story with us on Wednesday the 27th February, followed by a Q&A session and book signing.
Manal will take us on a journey back to her years growing up in Mecca, and explain how she ended up fighting for women's rights in the most masculine society on earth today.
Manal is not only a Fishburners member, but one of TIME Magazine's 100 most influential people in the world, Forbes top 50 women in tech, and Newsweek's top 10 tech-revolutionary in the world, is a prominent voice advocating for women's rights and empowerment. She is known to be the first Saudi women to specialise in Information Security with a career started back in 2002 with Saudi Aramco, the largest oil company in the world.
In 2011, al-Sharif co-founded and led the #Women2Drive movement, to challenge the ban on women driving in her country. She was arrested and imprisoned for "driving while female". Released on the condition that she never drives again on Saudi lands, never to speak about it or do any interviews, she continued campaigning for #Women2Drive and #IAmMyOwnGuardian to end male guardianship in her country. She started #Faraj, to help domestic helpers leave jail and #IAmLama that resulted in codifying the first anti-domestic violence law in Saudi. For her activism, she won the first Vaclav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent.
She is a TED & Harvard speaker, and also spoke in the United Nations, UNESCO, the Obama Summit, Google, Yahoo!, Oslo Freedom Forum, WIRED, Trust Women, The Arab Institute in Paris, the Center for International and Strategic Studies in Washington DC, Roosevelt House in NY, Clinton Global Initiative, Women in the World, Dallas World Affairs Council, and many others.
Her speech at the Oslo Freedom Forum was chosen amongst 75 notable speeches throughout history, published in the book Speeches of Note by Shaun Usher.
A blogger and regular contributor to international media, Manal has written for the NY Times, the Washington Post, Alhayat and many others. Her Amazon bestseller memoir ‘Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman’s Awakening’, is an intimate story of her life growing up in one of the most masculine societies in the world. It was voted by GoodReads Readers Choice Award as one of the best ten memoirs for 2017 and was listed as #1 book for the summer read by Oprah Magazine.
al-Sharif uses her leadership and social media experience coupled with her expertise in IT, to ignite social reform. She speaks to inspire, empower and drive change.