Nada Abdel Sater Abou Samra: The women profile of an international lawyer and HR activist

The Daily Star newspaper published last Monday an article about Nada Abdelsater-Abusamra, the international lawyer who represented the interests of the victims of the Feb. 14, 2005, attack that killed former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri and 21 others. Abdelsater is also the chairperson of the Lebanese Transparency Association (LTA), a member of the Maronite League, a managing partner of ASAS Law Firm, and a former law lecturer at the American University of Beirut.
As a young woman, Abdelsater took part in community service through distributing books to schoolchildren who could no longer afford them because the civil war caused a steep devaluation of the Lebanese currency.  She also organised various social activities for war orphans. In 1994, she joined the law program at St. Joseph University, and later earned her Master of Law degree at Harvard. She passed the New York bar exam and returned to Lebanon in 2000, where she married and had three children with her husband, Walid Abu-Samra.
As to how she manages to balance her many responsibilities as well as spend time with her children, she says that she gets a lot of help from her mother-in-law, but she added that private companies should work harder to help women, for instance, by offering daycare services to give them the opportunity to be on par with men in the professional world. Nonetheless, she concluded by saying that a work-life balance is not the only challenge facing working women. Arab society often tends to see women simply as feminine, without acknowledging their professionalism. Abdelsater added that men, everywhere, are often condescending at first when addressing women colleagues and some are insecure in the presence of highly qualified women.
Source: The Daily Star 17 June 2014