CBS News foreign correspondent Holly Williams, who has been reporting this week from northern Iraq, talks to FORTUNE about the advantages of being a woman in a war zone:
Sometimes when you travel to more conservative parts of the Middle East, obviously you are going to get treated differently as a woman than as a man. I have never felt it is a disadvantage. If anything, it can sometimes be an advantage to be a foreign woman in this part of the world because people are disarmed by it. There is such a culture of hospitality in this part of the world and people often feel sympathetic to you as a woman so they go out of their way to help you. They are less suspicious of you because you are a woman. When you are in the more conservative places, as a foreigner, you have access to both the men and the women. As a male corespondent, you can only talk to the men.