The Egyptian Foreign Ministry's regular qualification examinations to select new staff members — next scheduled for July — have sparked widespread debate on job prospects at the ministry for veiled women. Many Egyptians believe that veiled women are routinely disqualified no matter their qualifications and performance on the examination, which includes a two-hour written test in general culture and language proficiency.

In March 2012, when the Muslim Brotherhood began to dominate the state institutions after taking control over the People’s Assembly and the Shura Council, journalists were surprised to see a veiled woman among those accepted to take an introductory course at the Egyptian Foreign Ministry’s Institute for Diplomatic Studies.

Mohamed Kamel Amr, who was the foreign minister at the time, was present for the opening of the course. In response to questions from reporters, Amr responded that there was no law that bans veiled women from representing Egypt at the diplomatic level. Shortly after, Amr Roshdy, who was serving at the time as the spokesman for the Foreign Ministry, stressed in a statement that the ministry had always included veiled women among its staff and that he had worked with some of them. He added that their low numbers do not mean that they are unwelcome in the ministry.

Meanwhile, the last foreign minister under President Hosni Mubarak, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, used to boast that women working in his ministry did not wear the hijab. In her memoir "No Higher Honor," former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice praised this “secular move.” Rice described Aboul Gheit as “the quintessential secular Egyptian, distrustful of the Islamists and proud of the fact that a significant number of women in his ministry did not wear the veil."