I disguised myself as a boy so I could go to school

Zahra Joya was only five years old when a huge door closed to her – and to all girls in her home country of Afghanistan. The Taliban had seized power in 1996 and banned females from attending school. But with her father out of the country, Zahra’s mother came up with a daring workaround: presenting her daughter as a little boy.

“It was my mother’s idea to give me this chance, but I was passionate about learning. I always said, ‘I need to go to school, I need to play outside with boys’. I had the chance to become a self-made boy,” recalls Zahra, who now lives in the UK and is a bye-fellow at the University of Cambridge’s Hughes Hall.

She fled Afghanistan in 2021 after the Taliban regained control, and now runs a news agency that highlights the oppression of women.

Zahra, 33, says her passion for female equality is firmly rooted in the childhood days she spent playing the role of a boy called Mohammed: an experience that “shifted the course of my life”.