“People told me it was only for men,” says Reem Badran, Founder & CEO of Al Hurra for Management and Business Development and former member of the Jordanian House of Representatives, when speaking about her decision to run for the Amman Chamber of Commerce in the latest episode of the Riyada podcast from the Wilson Center’s Middle East Program.  Badran is a Jordanian trailblazer and was recently named One of the World’s Most Successful Women in Business by the International Women’s Entrepreneurial Challenge Foundation in New York. In 2009, she became the first woman elected to the board of Amman’s Chamber of Commerce since its establishment in 1923. To this day, she remains the only woman to be elected to this post. “In our community [and] region, it is not easy for women to be able to penetrate the business community. It takes a while for people to believe in a woman and that she can have a successful business.”