Female circumcision, arranged marriages and strict dress codes are some of the injustices suffered by women in Egypt, which is considered one of the more liberal of the predominantly Moslem countries.

Visiting Bermuda last week, Egyptian model Mrs. Nada Hanna commented how lucky Bermudians were.

"It's so different here,'' she said. "It's like night and day.'' While women living in cities enjoyed many of the benefits of their Western counterparts including equal career opportunities and the right to vote, tradition still dictates that girls must be circumcised at birth and virgins when they marry.

European surgeons do a roaring practice in prenuptial "reconstruction'', she said.

Mrs. Hanna said she had to fight hard with her mother to save her own daughter from circumcision -- a barbaric practice in which parts of a girl's genitalia are sliced away with a knife.

Divorce among Christian Egyptians is unheard of, Mrs. Hanna said. But Moslem law dictates that children over 12 automatically become wards of their fathers.

On an everyday level, Egyptian women who dare wear short skirts are harassed on the street and a public kiss can ruin a woman's reputation.

Speaking last week as the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing was underway, Shadow Health Minister Ms Renee Webb related her experiences during a trip to Saudi Arabia.

Ms Webb said she was shocked at how women were treated as second class citizens. There, she said, baby girls were betrothed at birth, adultery was grounds for a death sentence for a woman but not for a man and in the event of divorce, children automatically became the property of their father.

While Ms Webb admitted Bermuda's inequalities paled in comparison, she claimed there was still a way to go before Bermudian women achieved equal status in terms of pay and more child care centres for working women.

"Under the law, men and women are equal but in terms of everyday life, they are not,'' she said. "Women are expected to bear the brunt of work and raising children.'' Bermuda, she said, was still a male-dominated society with men taking the front seat in board rooms and politics.

Mrs. Nada Hanna