8.1 Introduction

In this chapter, we revisit two themes that were first addressed in Chapter 1. We look again at how difficult it will be for the countries of the MENA region to modernise and diversify their national economies (and, if they choose to, reform their moribund rentier political systems) but also why it is essential that they do this. We then explain, in some detail, why women must be allowed to play a bigger role in this process during the 2020s and 2030s. While there are many legal, ethical and moral reasons for doing more to emancipate and empower women in this part of the world, there are now equally well-established, robust and compelling economic and business cases for doing this. Indeed, in an academic career spanning twenty-five years, I cannot recall any other issue over which there is such a degree of unanimity among scholars and other commentators with often very different ideological and economic viewpoints. The economic rationale for increasing the participation of women in regional labour markets is described in Section 8.3, and in Section 8.4 we present the business case for encouraging greater gender diversity in public- and private-sector organisations in the UAE, Oman, the KSA, the other Gulf States and the broader MENA region. As noted in Chapter 1, it is these – more than anything else – which may eventually compel governments in this region to initiate the reforms that would allow many more women to participate as equals with men in their societies, economies and workplaces. The conclusion describes why there is understandable trepidation among most Arab men about the emancipation and empowerment of women, but it also seeks to explain why the countries of the MENA region must embrace the legal, regulatory and labour market reforms that are necessary prerequisites for creating inclusive and gender-diverse workforces in the future.

8.2 The Limits of Globalisation in the MENA Region

While many commentators have highlighted the enormous economic potential of the MENA region, they have also commented with monotonous regularity on its ‘extraordinary talent for disappointment’ (The Economist, 2015c: 64) and, in his widely cited 2007 book, The Emerging Markets Century, Agtmael barely mentions the MENA region preferring instead to focus on what he regarded as the much more promising economic prospects of Asia, Africa and South America (Agtmael, Reference Agtmael2007). On first impression, they do not appear to be particularly difficult places in which to conduct business. In 2015, for example, the UAE was ranked thirtieth of eighty-two countries and the KSA forty-first of eighty-two in The Economist’s ‘Business Environment’ rankings (Oman did not appear on this list, and the highest-ranked countries in 2015 were Singapore, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Canada and Australia). However, no MENA countries were ranked in the top twenty, and The Economist continues to place the region at the bottom or joint bottom in seven of ten business categories.

It should also be remembered that this ranking, only assesses how easy – or difficult – it is for foreign-owned entities to conduct business and establish new ventures in these countries. It does not measure how easy – or difficult – it is for nationals in these countries to create new businesses and to carry out their daily functions and tasks (The Economist Intelligence Unit, 2015a: 1, 2 and 7). Furthermore, while ‘talking the innovation talk’ and creating some technology parks and technology incubators, most Arab countries are still investing very little in research and development (R&D) or in emerging technology sectors. In fact, with the notable exception of Israel and Morocco, the MENA region has fallen even further behind the world’s leading industrial economies on all metrics of innovation and R&D over the last five years (The Economist, 2016n: 42).

As we have seen, while several countries in the Arabian Gulf and elsewhere in the region still have ample supplies of oil and gas, these are finite, and even those states with substantial reserves have, at most, a generation to use this wealth to diversify their national economies and greatly improve the per-capita productivity levels of their still-under-developed private sectors.¹ As we have also seen, the Gulf States and broader MENA region are home to rapidly growing, young, educated and – in some cases – very affluent populations. This could lead to the emergence of a large and stable professional middle-class; something that all economists believe has to happen in the region to support sustainable economic development in the future. However, all MENA countries, including the relatively stable countries of the Arabian Gulf, continue to be characterised by systemic structural weaknesses. As we saw in Chapter 1, these include unrepresentative and often oppressive governments, a lack of institutional governance and oversight, the absence of open civic discourse and citizen engagement, the absence of a free and independent press and media, repressive security agencies, often inefficient and overbearing public-sector institutions, widespread corruption, opaque legal processes and a quagmire of complex tribal, ethnic and religious divisions (Foley, Reference Foley2010; Ulrichsen, Reference Ulrichsen2011). As The Economist has observed,

A report from Chatham House, an organisation that publishes considered and balanced reports on the economic, political and social development of countries, has described the challenges that face the Arabian Gulf States and – by implication – the broader MENA region in these stark terms:

Another study that was equally critical of the lack of progress made by the ‘state-capitalist’ countries of the GCC towards economic diversification has concluded that:

The collapse of oil and gas prices during 2014–2016 has meant that average GDP growth across the GCC fell from 4.0 per cent in 2014 to 2.3 per cent in 2015 to less than 1 per cent in 2016, and every country in this group had to draw on significant cash reserves to prop up their economies, maintain their generous welfare systems and complete expensive infrastructure projects. However, even when hydrocarbon prices rise – as they inevitably will – this will not help ensure that these countries move with alacrity to developing diversified economies, with the possible exceptions of the UAE and Qatar, which can be regarded as (relatively) the most ‘progressive’ countries in the Arabian Gulf. For the best part of four decades, the hydrocarbon-rich countries of the GCC have showered cash and largesse on their national citizens, and they greatly increased their lavish spending on healthcare, education and other subsidies in the aftermath of the 2011 Arab Spring. In 2016, the citizens of the UAE, Oman and the KSA still received free land to build houses on and enjoyed free cradle-to-grave medical care, and there were no income or property taxes. Education costs were still heavily subsidised and included generous grants for undergraduate and postgraduate studies abroad. These subsidies are, as we have seen, an essential part of the implicit social contract that has kept the ruling elites of these three countries in power for decades, and it will be extremely difficult to remove them without provoking some kind of backlash.

All external observers of the MENA region believe that the inexorable regional fall-back from ‘peak oil’ levels of oil production will mean that such munificence will become increasingly unsustainable in the future. The steep fall in the price of oil and gas during 2014–2016 also served as a reminder to the governments of the GCC and other MENA countries that this bounty will not last forever and what will eventually happen to their economies when they can no longer rely on the revenues these had been generating. On average, 80 per cent of the income of the governments of the GCC was still derived from the refining and sale of hydrocarbons and associated industries and businesses in 2015. In the case of the KSA, as noted in Chapter 6, the country’s cash reserves fell from $737 billion in 2014 to $623 billion in December 2015, and at this rate, it could use up all of its financial reserves by 2021 if oil and gas prices were to remain at 2016 levels. Oman has had a growing debt burden since the early 2010s and was expected to issue government bonds to cover revenue shortfalls from its declining oil and gas sector during 2017. The UAE will also suffer from large budget deficits if it cannot further diversify its economy by 2020 and create new sources of state revenue.

Meanwhile, the governments of Europe and North America have been making concerted efforts to reduce their dependence on oil imports from the Gulf and develop new sources of indigenous oil and gas supplies. There is also a collective international aversion to intervene militarily in the region after the bitter experiences of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria. Consequently, this period of relative austerity may act as a spur to more significant economic and labour-market reforms. All GCC governments are mulling over plans to increase corporate taxation for foreign companies, raise excise duties and make cutbacks to their highly salaried and bloated public sectors, and they are even considering the possibility of levying income tax on both expatriates and their national citizens, albeit at initially very low levels (al-Khatteeb, Reference al-Khatteeb2015: 2; Spindle, Reference Spindle2013). Such short-term and reactive measures, however, will not provide systemic, sustainable or long-term solutions to the economic, political and social challenges which all GCC and MENA countries now confront. As a report cited in Chapter 1 has suggested, ‘the best indicator of countries’ successful development is no longer sheer gross domestic product growth but rather risk-adjusted, sustainable growth. In order to implement the most effective diversification strategy, nations must first establish strong economic institutions capable of overseeing this process; a truly diversified economy requires institutional regulatory reform and systemic workplace development initiatives’ (Shediac et al, Reference Shediac, Moujales, Najjar and Ghaleb2011: 2).

As noted, the UAE and Qatar now appear have the most sustainable economies and, perhaps not coincidentally, they are also the ones in which women have made the most progress in their national labour markets, and both countries advocate a (comparatively) liberal interpretation of Islam. Kuwait and Bahrain, while still very conservative Islamic countries, appear to be making some progress with their diversification strategies. Oman is likely to face the biggest challenges to the compact it has created between the state and its citizens. The KSA, with a much larger and increasingly restive population, has the highest risk of political and social disorder and will face a very difficult transition to a post-oil economy over the next twenty years. Moreover, every government in the affluent Arabian Gulf States will have to deal with young populations who have skills and knowledge-sets that are unsuited to the changing requirements of their emerging private sectors and, in all likelihood, smaller public sectors during the 2020s. In 2016, more than 80 per cent of the economically active citizens of the UAE, Oman and the KSA still worked in government jobs or in state-owned companies, and, on average, more than 70 per cent of jobs in the private sector were still held by expatriates in these countries (The Economist, 2016b: 7). We have also seen that the educational systems of all three countries need major overhauls, particularly at the tertiary level, with a much greater emphasis being placed on courses in business and management, entrepreneurship and innovation and mathematics, science, technology and engineering – not the social sciences, humanities, education and religion.

Even the much-touted potential of the growing and youthful population of the MENA region comes with considerable risks, particularly from the spread of radical Islam in the region among poorer and disenfranchised groups. One report we cited in Chapter 7 identified a ‘widespread and simmering discontent’ among this demographic. Almost all of the 3,500 women and men who were interviewed for this study in sixteen MENA countries wanted to see significant reforms in their countries, although many were sceptical that ‘greater democracy’ was the solution to the problems their countries faced. Almost all of them believed that the rise of radical Islam and terrorism were the biggest threats to economic growth and stability in the MENA region, and very few supported ISIS. More than 40 per cent, on average, did not believe that their country was ‘heading in the right direction’, although this fell to just under 20 per cent in the Gulf States (excluding the KSA). More than 80 per cent were concerned about high levels of unemployment among young people. When asked which country in the MENA region they would most like to live in, the UAE was the top choice for both men and women. This was because they believed that the UAE is ‘a country where young Arabs are encouraged to reach their full potential across a range of industries and businesses, from technology start-ups to the arts and finance, in a culture they are familiar with’ (ASSDA’A Burson-Marsteller, 2015: 3 and 18). While they were very concerned about the many problems that confront the region they were cautiously optimistic about the future, although this survey was conducted during 2013–2014 before the recent slow-down in the economies of the MENA region.

While the three countries described in this study have – through a combination of generous public-sector employment and welfare provisions combined with overt and covert repression of independent political and civic activity – managed to maintain social stability, there are no guarantees that this can be maintained in the future. It is evident that there is a growing cleavage between the current generation of rulers in the UAE, Oman and the KSA and a rapidly growing and well-educated younger generation, who are beginning to question their countries’ traditional ruling arrangements and the social contracts that have held their countries together for the last four decades. Not only are they exposed to a wider range of external influences and alternative sources of information, they have also witnessed the upheavals and changes in other countries in the MENA region. This suggests that if the needs of all of their citizens, including those of women, are not accommodated, it seems very probable that increased civil conflict and social dislocation will be the most likely outcomes in these countries and others in the region in the future. Addressing these needs and providing greater opportunities for them to participate in national economies will be a critically important part of the transition to a more secure future for the countries of the Arabian Gulf and the broader MENA region. Kinninmont has suggested, as many commentators before her have done, that this will require all states in the region to introduce gradual and consensual political and social reforms (including a move to constitutional monarchies); align their economic diversification strategies with more participative political systems; develop stronger and more transparent parliamentary, institutional and judicial systems; encourage better standards of governance; allow peaceful, independent political groups and business associations to emerge and also ensure economic and social inclusion for all their citizens, including women (Kinninmont, Reference Kinninmont2015 4–5). Hence, while there is no doubt that economic, political and social change will occur in the Arabian Gulf States and the MENA region in the future, what form will these take and how well will they be managed?

All of the reports and studies by academic researchers, NGOs and international consulting and financial companies that are cited in this book are unanimous in their belief that the emancipation of women and their increased involvement in all economic, business and political spheres in Muslim countries is neither an ideological attack nor some kind of ‘Western’ conspiracy against Islam; it is, rather, an essential prerequisite for an Arabic Renaissance. In their view, the conservative attitudes that continue to hold women back in the MENA region were not and are not mandated by the Qur’an; they are rooted in culture, tradition and custom. And, as all sociologists and historians will attest, this means that they can change and evolve. The key to this transformation will be to find ways of empowering women that do not threaten deeply held religious values in Islamic countries, an issue we will revisit towards the end of this chapter, in Chapter 9 and the Postscript. Moreover, there are good reasons to believe that the economic empowerment and emancipation of women in the Gulf States and the broader MENA region is now, at the very least, possible.

8.3 The Rationale for Increasing the Participation of Women in the Economies of the MENA Region

Women now constitute about 40 per cent of the global workforce, but there are significant regional disparities in their participation in national economies. In the Gulf States and the MENA region they continue to be under-represented in national labour markets, and there is still an apparent lack of understanding among most regional governments of the enormous contribution they could make to their economies. Paradoxically, the Gulf States that are the richest in oil and gas (Bahrain, Kuwait, the KSA, Qatar and the UAE) had been – at least during the 1990s and 2000s – the most reluctant to extend political suffrage to women, had the smallest number of women in their national parliaments and ruling councils, had the fewest women working in their private and non-oil/gas sectors and offered their women very limited legal rights. Conversely, states with little hydrocarbon wealth such as Lebanon, Morocco and Tunisia tended to have more women elected to national assemblies and more women in the workforce, and they had also granted women more liberal legal rights (Cole, Reference Cole2014). This has changed to some extent in Bahrain, Kuwait, the KSA, Qatar and the UAE during the 2000s and 2010s, but is this enough to encourage the belief that these countries are committed to creating a more level playing field for women in either the political or economic spheres?

A Booz&Co report, first cited in Chapter 1, has argued that ‘the MENA region should remain committed to long-term reform [and] by providing policy stability governments can unleash the region’s considerable human promise – its increasingly educated and ambitious youth, its budding middle-class and its aspiring women.’ However, this report also cautioned that ‘it would be unfortunate if Middle-East government leaders, while pursuing appeasement measures and other short-term policies, regressed or relented on the systemic economic reforms that are needed for future growth and success’ (Saddi et al, Reference Saddi, Sabbagh and Shediac2012: 1–2). Included in these reforms is the necessity for greater inclusion, ‘particularly of those groups … who have thus far been omitted from the development equation. The most prominent and significant of these groups is women … Millions of young women are ready to enter the workforce and their inclusion will probably affect the Middle-East dramatically’ (Saddi et al, Reference Saddi, Sabbagh and Shediac2012: 9 and 11). This report – and many other studies – have shown repeatedly that broad-based macro-, meso- and micro-economic diversification will not be possible without increasing the number of women who work in the emerging economies of the MENA region. However, these have also demonstrated that when this is promoted by governments, it has always had a significant impact on national economic performance and growth. It is also, invariably, accompanied by a variety of beneficial socio-economic outcomes for women, because they have more disposable income, greater independence and – over time – enhanced legal rights. Another report, also cited in Chapter 1, has argued persuasively that:

This study demonstrated that countries in which women are well integrated into their national labour markets, in which they have advanced in all professional occupations and as business owners, and in which equal opportunity legislation has been enacted are also those where their economic power and social status was the highest. This, over time, has what economists describe as a ‘multiplier effect’ on emerging economies. As the level of socio-economic development in a given country increases, more women participate in its labour market and attitudes towards women at work, in different professional roles and, eventually, in leadership positions become more positive. This leads in time to further labour-market expansion, increases macro-economic performance and GDP growth and improves general socio-economic indicators, such as disposable wealth, security, health and personal autonomy and freedom for everyone, not just women (Aguirre et al, 2013: 2–3). Moreover, because the economic development of all countries is strongly correlated with the level of participation of women in their national labour markets, ‘the economic advancement of women doesn’t just empower women; it results in greater overall prosperity [and] economically empowering women is the key to greater economic and societal gains’ (Dubai Women Establishment, 2009: 39).

We noted in Chapter 1 a report by the McKinsey Global Institute which has examined how economic, legal and social gender inequality is distributed across the world, the impact of this on the national economic performance of ninety-five countries and the inevitable loss of economic performance output that accompanies large gender inequalities (Dobbs et al, Reference Dobbs, Woetzel, Madgavkar, Elingrud, Labaye, Devillard, Kutcher, Manyika and Krishnan2015). The nine McKinsey analysts who compiled this comprehensive report found that North America and Oceania had the highest gender-parity score of 0.74, Western Europe 0.71, and the nineteen countries of the MENA region had the lowest overall average score of 0.48 (based on fifteen measures, where a score of 1 represents perfect economic, legal and social parity between men and women). For ‘labour force participation’, ‘gender equality in work’ and ‘leadership positions’, the MENA region had scores of 0.32, 0.34 and 0.12, compared to 0.82, 0.74 and 0.72 in North America, Oceania and Europe. In 2015, women contributed about 18 per cent of the cumulative GDPs of MENA countries, and this was even lower in the oil-rich countries of the Arabian Gulf.

The authors of this report believe that there is ‘a clear link between gender equality in society and in work … gender equality in society is correlated with gender equality in work and with economic development [and] higher education … higher income-parity and better working conditions drive women to assume leadership roles on a par with men, and to move toward realising their full economic potential.’ They also found, not surprisingly, that there is ‘a strong link between attitudes that limit women’s potential and the actual gender equality outcomes in a given region.’ More than half of the MENA respondents in this study expressed such attitudes. The report also examined the potential impact of increasing the labour participation rate of women in emerging economies. They concluded that increasing female labour-force participation could boost national economic performance by 85 per cent across the MENA region and, potentially, could add more than 50 per cent to the region’s cumulative annual GDP within a decade. However, this would only happen if the labour-force participation rate of women exceeded 50 per cent by 2025 and they were making a significant contribution in the private sectors of these economies (Dobbs et al, Reference Dobbs, Woetzel, Madgavkar, Elingrud, Labaye, Devillard, Kutcher, Manyika and Krishnan2015, ix, 2–4, 6–7, 11, 14–15, 33 and 47–48).

In a follow-up report, McKinsey has estimated that the national economic benefits of investing in women in emerging economies would be six to eight times higher than the initial spending that would be required to unlock economic opportunities for women (Woetzel et al, Reference Woetzel, Madgavkar, Manyika, Ellingrud, Hunt and Krishnan2016: 25). Globally, the world economy could be $US24 trillion richer if the gender gaps in labour-force participation, the hours worked and the productivity of men and women were bridged. This results directly from a number of positive GDP impact indicators. These include having larger indigenous labour forces and a much bigger pool of potential employees to recruit from; fewer skills mismatches and labour shortages; an increase in the general skill levels, aptitudes and quality of employees; a surge in the number of people working in high-productivity and high-value growth sectors and, critically, having significantly more entrepreneurs and SME owners. Their report concluded that ‘gender inequality is not only a pressing moral and ethical issue, but it is also a critical economic challenge. The global economy cannot operate at its full potential with constraints holding back a significant proportion of the world’s population [and] regions with the largest gaps in gender equality have the largest economic opportunity’ (Woetzel et al, Reference Woetzel, Madgavkar, Manyika, Ellingrud, Hunt and Krishnan2016: 55).²

In its analysis of the global labour-force participation of women, the International Finance Corporation concluded that economic growth in emerging markets means that ‘more than ever, firms operating in these are expanding and constantly looking to sharpen their competitive edge and recruit the best talent. Against the backdrop of global increases in women’s education levels, employers can no longer afford to ignore women workers. Companies that do not integrate women’s employment into their business strategies risk a series of missed opportunities’ (International Finance Corporation, 2013b: 5). As Cole has also observed,

Consequently, all countries in the MENA region and their respective governments are now confronted with an irrefutable economic reality (even those with reasonable oil and gas reserves):

Hence, if the nation states of the MENA region are to rise from their generally low positions in the global league table of the world’s leading economies and improve on a range of other economic and development indexes, it is no longer reasonable or logical to hold back the rising aspirations and ambitions of their women. Perhaps a measure of the growing international awareness of this economic reality was the decision, ratified unanimously by the members of the G20 at their annual meeting in November 2014, to reduce the global gap between women’s and men’s labour-force participation rates by 25 per cent before 2025 in order ‘to bring 100 million women into the labour force, significantly increase global growth and reduce poverty and inequality’ (G20 Watch, 2014: 3).

The impact of initiatives that empower women can have a remarkably quick effect on their participation in national labour markets and economies. For example, women filled 75 per cent of the new jobs created in the European Union between 2000 and 2010. In the United States, just fifteen years after the influential 1995 United States Federal Glass Ceiling Commission (FGCC) report was published, women had become the breadwinners or co-breadwinners in two thirds of all families (up from one third in the early 1990s). By 2010, American women were also responsible for 83 per cent of all consumer purchases, controlled 51 per cent of personal wealth and had more than $5 trillion a year in consumer spending power, more than the annual GDP of most developed countries (Bennett and Ellison, Reference Bennet and Ellison2010: 40). They also represented one third of all entrepreneurs and were establishing new businesses at more than double the rate of men. Even with the pay gap between men and women which prevailed at that time, some economists predicted that the average woman in the United States, several European countries and Oceania would not only have achieved pay parity, many could be out-earning the average man by the late 2010s. As Bennet and Ellison noted at this time:

Robert Zoellick, the president of the World Bank Group from 2007 to 2012, has described gender equality as ‘smart economics’ and also pointed to the strong correlation between gender equality and the economic development of all countries (Ernst & Young, Reference Ernst and Young2009: 6). And the World Economic Forum, in an exhaustive analysis of the global competitiveness of 144 countries in 2015, concluded that:

Hence, it is very clear to those who have taken the time to study this evidence that the future economic sustainability of the MENA region will be dependent on the ability of governments to attract more women into their national labour markets and for public- and private-sector organisations to recruit, retain and promote a much larger number of female employees in the future. Those that fail to do this and respond in positive ways to the needs of women employees will lose out, as will the national economies in which they operate.

8.4 The Business Case for Promoting Gender Diversity in the Labour Markets of the MENA Region

Although we are unlikely to see anything similar to PepsiCo’s diversity statement on the ‘Vision, mission and values’ websites of most indigenous companies in the MENA region in the immediate future, it is emblematic of the sea change that has occurred in the HRM policies and practices of many businesses based in the European Union, North America and Oceania over the last two decades. This came about in response to pro-women legal and regulatory reforms in these regions, the entry of tens of millions of women into their labour forces, changing cultural norms and social attitudes and, more recently, a growing awareness of the business case for promoting gender and other forms of diversity in organisations. The first part of this section presents the generic business case for gender diversity in public- and private-sector organisations, and the second deals with the relationship between the presence of women in executive positions and on boards of directors and corporate performance and profitability. Broadly speaking, three arguments have been presented for promoting gender diversity in public- and private-sector organisations although, in practice, these invariably overlap with each other. These are:

• The moral/legal case: ‘Because our organisation believes it is the right thing to do and/or employment laws require us to address the issue of gender equality and diversity.’

• The qualitative case: ‘It just makes good intuitive business sense to employ more women and promote gender diversity in our organisation.’

• The quantitative case: ‘Because there is a strong evidential case for employing more women and promoting gender diversity in our organisation.’

The well-established moral and legal cases for the inclusion of women in national labour markets and for promoting gender diversity in organisations were presented in earlier chapters and have also been described in many previous reports on women in the MENA region, most notably in those published by the United Nations over the last two decades. This is not to downplay the importance of these, but the primary purpose of this section is to present the business case for doing this.³ This begins with a trip back in time to one of the earliest national reports on gender and ethnic inequalities in the labour market of what was then the dominant industrial economy in the world. In 1995, the United States government published its 245-page FGCC report which presented the following bleak national employment statistics in its executive summary: ‘97 per cent of the senior managers of the Fortune 1000 companies are white; 95 to 97 per cent are male. In the Fortune 2000 industrial and service companies, 5 per cent of senior managers are women and, of that 5 per cent, virtually all are white’ (Federal Glass Ceiling Commission, 1995: iii). Of the tiny number of women who were in senior management or leadership positions at this time, most were concentrated in HR and administrative roles and not in operational roles such as production, manufacturing, sales or marketing.

The FGCC commented that ‘America’s vast human resources are not being fully utilised because of glass-ceiling barriers. Over half of all Masters degrees are now awarded to women, yet 95 per cent of senior level managers of the top Fortune 1000 and 500 service companies are men. Of them, 97 per cent are white’ (Federal Glass Ceiling Commission, 1995: iv). The principal causes of these inequities were ‘negative stereotypes, prejudice and bias’ among white men and the cultural, attitudinal and structural barriers embedded in the working cultures of male-dominated organisations in the mid-1990s. Among the common stereotypes about working women prevalent at this time were ‘not wanting to work’, ‘not being as committed to their careers as men’, ‘not being tough enough’, ‘being unwilling to work long or unusual hours’, ‘being unwilling to relocate’, ‘unwilling or unable to make decisions’, ‘too emotional’, ‘not sufficiently aggressive’, ‘too aggressive’, ‘too passive’ and ‘lacking quantitative skills’ (Federal Glass Ceiling Commission, 1995: 27–36). Such attitudes are, of course, still very familiar to the women who have been featured in this study and to all those who work in other countries in the MENA region. What is also remarkable is that despite compelling evidence that linked the promotion of equal opportunities with organisational performance and profitability, during the 1990s, 2000s and early 2010s there were reports almost every month of female employees suing organisations for discrimination and sexual harassment in North America, Europe and Oceania. This, as we will see in Chapter 9, still happens today.

While this report was a damning critique of the ways things were for working women and minority ethnic groups in the United States at this time, an equally important objective of the FGCC was to explain why both public- and private-sector organisations had to start engaging with the issue of employee diversity. It commented that ‘this state of affairs is not good for business. Corporate leaders recognise that it is necessary for their businesses to better reflect the market-place and their customers’ (Federal Glass Ceiling Commission, 1995: 148). To succeed in an increasingly competitive global business environment they also needed ‘to attract and retain the best, most flexible, workers and leaders available, for all levels of their organisations. Narrowing the pool of talent from which they draw is – among other things – a blunder in competitive tactics. Most business leaders know that they simply cannot afford to rely exclusively on white males for positions of leadership’ (Federal Glass Ceiling Commission, 1995: iv). Citing several research studies that had been published during the early 1990s, it concluded that there was a growing body of research ‘which indicates that shattering the glass ceiling is good for business. Organisations that excel at leveraging diversity (including hiring and promoting minorities and women into senior positions) can experience better financial performance in the long run than those which are not effective in managing diversity’ and this, over time, would also have a positive effect on macro-economic growth in the United States (Federal Glass Ceiling Commission, 1995: 14).

Every study and report on gender diversity that has been published since this time has arrived at broadly the same conclusions that the USFGCC did: gender exclusion is not only ethically and morally indefensible; it has a very negative effect on national economic growth and is an utterly thoughtless strategy for any business organisation. However, those organisations that have embraced gender diversity have found that this has invariably resulted in several tangible benefits.

8.5 How Gender Diversity Can Benefit Public- and Private-Sector Organisations in the MENA Region

In theory, the case for employee diversity in business makes good sense. It should mean that businesses that have embraced gender and ethnic diversity are in a stronger position to recruit and retain the best available staff; have employees that are more representative of and in tune with the company’s markets, clients and customers; have a broader range of insights and perspectives that will improve problem solving and decision making processes and, ultimately, higher levels of employee motivation, engagement and performance. In practice, however, the relationships between gender diversity and employee/organisational performance are more complicated and nuanced than this, and one of the first phrases that anyone who has studied statistics will hear is that ‘correlation does not equal causality’ (Vigen, Reference Vigen2015). Some of the studies cited in the last section were cautious about inferring direct causal links between gender diversity at the most senior levels of organisations and corporate performance. While there does not appear to be any indication of a negative relationship between these in the most recent studies that have been conducted, and while a positive relationship may well exist, more research is required to confirm this.

This ambiguity is understandable because business performance depends on so many endogenous (internal) and exogenous (external) variables. This makes it very difficult to tease out precise cause-and-effect relationships between input variables such as gender diversity and outcome measures such as organisational performance and profitability or, indeed, identifying the many factors that may ultimately explain why so few companies are able to sustain high performance levels over long periods of time (Rosenzweig, Reference Rosenzweig2007). So it is important to say that there are no guarantees that employing more women will lead, inevitably, to improved organisational efficiency, effectiveness and profitability. Given everything that has preceded this comment, it may appear to be a very contradictory thing to say, and the only way to justify this is with a few illustrative examples.

For the best part of the twentieth century Kodak was the world’s biggest manufacturer of photographic equipment, film and developer paper. This company no longer exists because its complacent and out-of-touch male leadership missed the inexorable uptake of digital technologies by consumers and the rise of the Internet in the early to mid-1990s. They were also unable to see that if the company was to survive it would have to make a rapid transition from manufacturing traditional cameras and reloadable film to digital units with digital photographic support. By 2011, the company was bankrupt and engaged in a desperate last-ditch attempt to raise capital to fund new digital and printer businesses by selling off its extensive patent portfolio (Bachelard and Crawford, Reference Bachelard and Crawford2004; Matioli, 2012). Embracing gender diversity in, say, the early 2000s would not have rescued this company from oblivion because it was past saving. It is also highly improbable that employing more women or embracing gender diversity would have helped Apple much during the time when Steve Jobs was not the leader of that company from the mid-1980s to the late 1990s, and the same can be said of Blackberry or Nokia during the 2000s and many other companies that have struggled for survival in recent times. What this means is that if an organisation is already dysfunctional and rapidly losing market share, simply employing more women will neither guarantee greater organisational efficiency and effectiveness nor help a failing company to turn its fortunes around. And, in the absence of good leadership and a high-performance operating culture, simply employing more women will probably have no effect on organisational performance, at least in the short term. Hence, employing more women would have done little to help oil, gas and mining companies cope with low natural resource prices during 2015–2017. However, and this is the key point, it could help all of them become more commercially successful in the future, and we will look at one international mining and resource company’s renewed commitment to company-wide gender diversity initiatives in Chapter 9.

What all of the research on the relationship between gender and high-performance companies really provides us with are some very powerful insights into the mind-sets of those organisations that have made this (and all other types of employee diversity) a strategic HR priority and who have – as far as possible – jettisoned all ‘irrelevant differences’, such as their employees’ gender and ethnic origins, from their operational cultures. They are, quite simply, only interested in recruiting the best employees, and these days that means attracting the best-qualified and smartest women who will, to repeat a point made earlier, outperform men of average abilities and intelligence. For those who may still be sceptical about the benefits of gender diversity, it is also worth asking why so many Western companies have made this a strategic HRM priority in recent times. They would not be doing this unless they believed it made a tangible and measurable improvement to both employee and organisational performance. For example, the CEOs in the Harvard Business Review study cited earlier included Arjay Banga (MasterCard), Paul Black (Merisant), Ken Frazier (Merck), Carlos Ghosn (Nissan), Andrea Jung (Avon), Brian Moynihan (Bank of America), Mikael Ohlsson (IKEA), Ken Powell (General Mills), Jim Rogers (Duke Energy), Barry Salzberg (Deloitte), Randolph Stephenson (AT&T) and Jim Turley (Ernst & Young) (Groysberg and Connolly, Reference Groysberg and Connolly2013). While the significant commitment that these CEOs have made to gender and cultural diversity may have been driven by ethical, moral and altruistic motives, it is also reasonable to assume that none of them would have done this if they had not also believed in the commercial benefits of doing so.

Hence, while a strategic commitment to gender (and ethnic/cultural) diversity may not lead immediately to enhanced organisational and commercial performance, the evidence presented in this chapter indicates that functional companies that have diverse workforces are much more likely to be commercially successful and more profitable than companies with less diverse workforces as measured by a number of well-established quantitative and qualitative organisational performance metrics. All other things being equal, those businesses that employ the right people, from the top to the bottom of the organisation, will, given time, perform better than those who choose not to do this. Consequently, employing the best women is likely to be beneficial for any business that has the potential to improve what it is currently doing and to enable it to function more effectively in an increasingly competitive and complex global business environment.

Can these principles and policies be applied in the Gulf States and the MENA region? The answer appears to be yes, but with a few qualifications. A detailed study by the International Finance Corporation of the diversity policies of numerous companies in several dozen emerging economies provides many practical examples of how these have benefited those organisations, leading to increased employee productivity and improved corporate performance. The benefits documented by these firms include an ability to attract a broader range of new employees and an improvement in the quality of new recruits, better customer outreach and greater awareness of potential new markets, reduced labour turnover among women, increased employee motivation, engagement and performance, better decision making, more creative and innovative ideas from employees, improved compliance and risk-management oversight, improved health and safety records, better community outreach and an enhanced company image.

This report also noted that some of the benefits of diversity programs may become apparent quite quickly, such as an improvement in the quality of graduate recruits and lower levels of labour turnover among women. Others are likely to take longer, such as improvements in employee performance, creativity and innovation, macro-organisational performance and bottom-line results and the organisation’s image and reputation among women. Nevertheless, in an age when the behaviour of companies is under increasing scrutiny, a demonstrable commitment to women’s employment and inclusion ‘can help companies to become, “employers of choice”, and ensure their long-term access to talent [and] it can also help companies gain access to markets where investors and buyers are influenced by social objectives’ (International Finance Corporation, 2013b: 56; see also Kotler and Lee, Reference Kotler and Lee2005; McElhaney, Reference McElhaney2008: 122–123).

The annual meeting of the World Economic Forum on the Middle-East and North Africa, held in Jordan during May 2015, was notable for the appeals made by the several hundred predominantly male businesspeople who attended this event to their governments. They asked them to resist the spread of militant Islam, to allow more partnerships with foreign companies, to encourage inward investment and business collaborations, to work harder to modernise and diversify their economies and to encourage more women to work in their home countries (Reuters, 2015). Other signs of changing attitudes towards working women and female leaders in the MENA region included the creation of the Gender Balance Council in Dubai to promote new strategies for female empowerment chaired by Sheikha Manal Bint Mohammed Bin Rashid al-Maktoum, the daughter of the ruler of Dubai. Dubai also hosted the first Power of Women of Arabia Debate in October 2015, which was co-chaired by the CNN anchor Becky Anderson and Dr Essam Tamimi. The attendees included Raja al-Gurg and Nadine Halabi of the Dubai Women Council; Lana Mamkegh, Lebanon’s Minister of Culture; Natasha Ekstedt, Director of Marketing and PR at Leaders Middle-East magazine; Dr Amina al-Rustamani, CEO of TECOM investments; and Sheikha Zain al-Sabah, Kuwait’s Minister for Youth. There were also representatives from numerous public- and private-sector organisations including the Dubai Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Philips, AIG, the Meera Kaul Foundation, Servcorp and AT Kearney Consulting (Moukhallati, Reference Moukhallati2016).

On 22 February 2016, Dubai was also host to the first Global Women’s Forum to be held in the MENA region. This was attended by Christine Lagarde, the Managing Director of the IMF; Queen Rania of Jordan; Sheik Abdullah bin Zayed, UAE Minister for Foreign Affairs; Reem al-Hashimy, UAE Minister for International Cooperation; Sheikha Lubna al-Qasimi, UAE Minister for Tolerance; Hana al-Rostamani, Head of Consumer Banking at First Gulf Bank; and several other notable local businesspeople, as well as 200 speakers and 2,000 participants drawn from every country in the MENA region and elsewhere. Its purpose is to act as ‘a global exchange of ideas related to gender diversity, female engagement and women’s contribution to societies’ and to ‘boost women’s influence, design plans to encourage their greater contribution and to promote diversity in the business world’ (Leaders Middle-East, 2015; Redvers, Reference Redvers2015a). And, in September 2015, the international hotel group Rezidor announced that it had committed to increasing the number of women in leadership roles to 30 per cent, including in its Middle East division. The general manager of the company’s Radisson Blue Hotel in Dubai, Maria Tullberg, commented that ‘organisations with more women in the team do out-perform companies with less women. They have higher equity, they have higher returns on sales, and they have a higher return on investment capital. So, this is a business issue’ (Hoteliermiddleeast.com, 2015). Similar initiatives for female employees in the Middle East operations of the American firm Honeywell were also announced in 2015 (Honeywell, 2015).

Even in Saudi Arabia, there were some signs of changing attitudes in the local business community towards working women with the establishment of the Step Ahead Program by the Saudi recruitment agency Glowork. This is now an annual careers event that connects Saudi women to job opportunities and offers workshops on writing CVs and coaching for interviews. In 2013, forty-five KSA organisations attended this event. In April 2015, more than 300 organisations, many from the private sector, attended sessions in Riyadh, Jeddah and Dammam. As we saw in Chapter 6, women now make up more than half of all university graduates in Saudi Arabia and they represent a woefully under-utilised talent pool that many private-sector companies have yet to engage with. The Saudi companies that will benefit the most from this will be those who are the quickest to implement programs to recruit, develop and retain women, and the example of Huda al-Ghoson and Saudi Aramco in Chapter 7 is a suitable reminder that it is possible for organisations in the KSA to embrace gender diversity if they choose to do so.

A measure of the progress that has been made in attitudes towards female employment in the MENA region, but also a reminder of the work that remains to be done to improve job opportunities for women, can be found in a survey by the recruitment and job agency Bayt.com in 2014. This reported that 72 per cent of 1,453 female respondents from thirteen MENA countries were working in mixed-gender environments, an increase from less than 50 per cent in 2010, although this figure fell to just 31 per cent in the KSA. Less than one in seven of these women were working in ‘female-only’ work environments, and 15 per cent worked in mixed organisations with separate male/female sections. Only 8 per cent of this group of women indicated that they were ‘uncomfortable’ working in mixed-gender environments. Most of the women in mixed environments felt they had equal treatment in recruitment and selection, advice and support, working hours and training and development. While almost half felt that their promotion prospects were based entirely on performance on the job, not their gender, about one third felt that they had a lower chance of being promoted than their male colleagues and were treated less favourably than men in terms of career progression (Bayt.com, 2014).

Of course, if these results had been obtained from a sample of American, British or Australian working women in 2014 they would have been regarded, at the very least, as disappointing. They would also have been followed by critical media reports and prompt remedial action by the organisations concerned. However, in the context of the MENA region, they can be regarded as encouraging signs of change. While only one of these women was the CEO of a private-sector firm, 11 per cent of these women worked in senior management or executive positions, and 24 per cent were in middle-management roles. It was also notable that 55 per cent of these women reported that the biggest source of happiness in their lives was ‘having a successful career’, well ahead of ‘spending time with my family’ (32%) and ‘making money’ (30%); and perhaps the most surprising result from this survey was that 67 per cent of these women believed that their country ‘has reached the same level of workplace gender equality as Western countries, at least to some extent’ (Bayt.com, 2014).

While there will be continuing deliberations about the effects of diversity initiatives on the bottom-line performance of companies, the international consulting firm Deloitte has concluded that debates about the benefits of gender diversity in business organisations ‘are over’. For this international consulting business, ‘the volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world that all businesses now operate in makes employee diversity an organisational imperative … making robust decisions and solving complex problems will only be possible if leaders are connected to, and include, diverse points of view. And, in relation to followership, leaders will need to behave highly inclusively, if they are to lead increasingly diverse and dispersed workforces’ (Bourke and Dillon, Reference Bourke and Dillon2015: 6). In comments that are of particular relevance to the countries of the MENA region, this report also underscored the emergent demographic trends that have been highlighted in previous chapters which:

These ‘irrelevant differences’ have been highlighted throughout this book and we will look at how organisations in the UAE, Oman and the KSA could make them a thing of the past in Chapter 9.

Although there are some encouraging signs of change it will be some time before a significant number of women rise to leadership positions in public- and private-sector organisations in these countries and in the broader MENA region. In part, this is a direct consequence of demographic realities. Most national employees are young and they are concentrated in junior and middle-management positions, and so it will be ten to twenty years before most of them are ready for the challenges associated with leadership roles. It is also important to remember that even the leading industrial economies of the OECD are still ‘works in progress’ when it comes to the participation of women in their national labour markets and in terms of the number of women in leadership positions in those countries. In the West, while women made major inroads into all professions and occupations during the 1990s and 2000s, most were employed at the lower to middle levels of organisational hierarchies and many of them encountered discrimination at work. During the 2000s, few women made it into leadership positions in North American, European or Oceanic business organisations. In the United States, for example, women occupied 11.9 per cent of CEO positions in the private sector in 2002; in Australia, it was a paltry 1 per cent – down from 2.9 per cent in 2000. Fifty-three per cent of Australia’s top 200 companies had no women in executive positions in 2002 compared to 14 per cent of US companies (Casella, Reference Casella2001). These figures remained static during the 2000s, and the number of women directors in the United States actually declined slightly during the second half of this decade (Fox, Reference Fox2006; Wittenburg-Cox and Maitland, Reference Wittenburg-Cox and Maitland2008).

It is true that a small number of women have since become CEOs of some of the largest companies in the world. During 2011, Meg Whitman (former CEO of eBay) was appointed CEO of Hewlett-Packard and Virginia Rometty replaced Sam Palmisano as the first female CEO of IBM. But by May 2012, just seventeen women were CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, although this did represent an increase of more than 100 per cent from the meagre seven who were CEOs in 2003 and, by 2016, nearly 20 per cent of board directors in the United States were women, an increase from 16.9 per cent in 2013 (Catalyst, 2015; Parker et al, Reference Parker, Horowitz, Wang, Brown and Patten2015: 13). In the UK, the very small number of women applying for executive positions in the private sector during the 2000s prompted the creation of Bird & Co Executive Board and Mentoring by Kathleen O’Donovan, one of the country’s most senior non-executives. Its mission was to coach, mentor and develop 100 women to make them ‘board-ready’ (Groom, Reference Groom2009). By mid-2012, one quarter of UK companies had at least 25 per cent female membership on their boards (Dzhambazova, Reference Dzhambazova2012), and the total number of women on the boards of the Financial Times Stock Exchange (FTSE) 100 companies had risen from 12.5 per cent in 2011 to 17.3 per cent in 2013 to nearly 23 per cent by 2016 (Peacock, Reference Peacock2013; Women on Boards, 2016). And, in what may be a sign that female representation on the boards of listed companies in Australia had reached a tipping point, the number of women directors exceeded 22 per cent in 2016 for the first time and 48 per cent of appointees during the first six months of the year were women (Australian Institute of Company Directors, 2016).

In Europe, two studies in the early 2000s revealed that women accounted for only 8 per cent of the top executive jobs in 235 European companies (Barta et al, Reference Barsh, Devillard and Wang2012; Paradise et al, Reference Devillard, Graven, Lawson, Paradise and Sancier-Sultan2012). The relatively small ratio of women sitting on the boards of large firms in the European Union (13.7% in 2012) prompted Viviane Reding, the European Union’s Justice Commissioner, to consider legislative action and, possibly, quotas to redress this inequity. Four notable exceptions to this general pattern of low representation were Norway, Finland, France and Sweden where, respectively, 35.5, 29.9, 29.7 and 28.8 per cent of company board positions were occupied by women in 2015. The figures for other countries in the Euro-region in 2015 were Belgium (23.4%), United Kingdom (22.8%), Denmark (21.9%), Netherlands (21.0%), Germany (18.5%), Spain (18.2%) and Switzerland (17.0%) (The Economist, 2012: 65). Overall, these data reveal a steady but not spectacular rise in the number of women in senior and board positions in business organisations in many countries over the last decade. There are, however, continuing disparities between men and women in all countries. In Australia, for example, while women constituted one third of managers in seventy-two large private-sector companies in 2015, they only occupied 25 per cent of senior management positions and just 14 per cent of executive-level roles in these organisations. The Workplace Gender Equality Agency, which has collected data from 4,600 Australian companies, believes that both cultural and structural barriers still hold women back and these are a consequence of ‘our nation’s cultural perceptions of the traditional roles of men and women at work. We have a strong notion of the male breadwinner that flows into workplace cultures’ (Desloires et al, Reference Desloires, Uther and Yustantio2015: 1).

Even in countries where there is a reasonable degree of parity and equity between women and men, some curious gender discrepancies still persist. For example, while 80 per cent of the 1,835 Americans surveyed by Pew Research in 2015 believed that men and women make equally good leaders, 37 per cent felt that a woman would do a better job as the head of a major hospital or a retail chain (compared to 14% and 15% for men), but for a large bank or financial institution, the figures were 29 and 19 per cent. For a computer software company, the figures were 18 per cent for women and 29 per cent for men, 11 versus 46 per cent for a large oil or gas company and 8 versus 54 per cent for a professional sports team (Parker et al, Reference Parker, Horowitz, Wang, Brown and Patten2015: 26 and 29). A study of 30,000 employees at 118 companies across 9 industrial sectors found that many organisations still face problems ensuring that women move up the career pipeline, 4 decades after national equal-opportunity laws were first introduced in the United States and many other countries. This report suggested that women ‘are less likely to advance than men, hold fewer roles leading to top management positions, and are a century away from gender parity in the C-suite if progress continues at the pace that prevailed between 2012 and 2015’ (Krivkovich et al, Reference Krivkovich, Kutcher and Yee2016: 1).

Certain sectors, such as industrial manufacturing, automotive, energy, mining/resources and technology are still unable to attract equal numbers of women for entry-level positions. This is not because any of these organisations discriminate against female applicants – it is a consequence of the low number of women who graduate in STEM disciplines. It does, however, limit the pool of female talent that is available for middle- and senior-management positions. Even in sectors where there is parity in entry-level recruitment between women and men (logistics and transportation, retail and consumer goods, healthcare and pharmaceuticals, hospitality and financial and professional services), there is a noticeable drop-off in the number of women in middle- and senior-management roles. To cite one example, in logistics and transportation, 48 per cent of entry-level employees are women, this falls to 30 per cent at the managerial levels, 21 per cent for senior managers and directors, 22 per cent for VPs, 17 per cent for senior VPs, and 13 per cent at the CEO level. The authors of this report concluded that this can happen because many of these companies preferred to fill vacant senior positions by importing a high percentage of ‘lateral hires’ or had inadequate succession and leadership development processes in place for their female employees in middle-management positions. This pattern was repeated across all nine industrial sectors, although once women had made it past the senior VP level they were then almost as likely as men to become CEOs (Krivkovich et al, Reference Krivkovich, Kutcher and Yee2016: 4–5 and 6).

Why aren’t there more women in senior and executive positions in business in OECD countries? For the 1,835 American men and women surveyed by Pew Research in 2015, the top three reasons were: ‘Women are held to a higher standard than men’ (for 52% of women and 33% of men), ‘Many businesses aren’t yet ready to hire women for the top positions’ (50%/35%), and ‘Family responsibilities don’t leave enough time for running a major corporation’ (26%/20%). While few of this group believed that gender discrimination was a widespread problem, as many as 77 per cent of women and 63 per cent of men felt that further changes will be required to bring about full gender equality in American workplaces (Parker et al, Reference Parker, Horowitz, Wang, Brown and Patten2015: 35 and 38). What this comparative information tells us is that even if the business case for gender diversity is now well established and broadly accepted by business organisations in the West, there are few companies in which women have achieved full professional equality with men, and stereotypical attitudes about women’s aptitude for senior roles are still prevalent. It also confirms that even if countries in the MENA region were to significantly increase the participation of women in their national labour markets, it will take at least one generation before we see a significant number of women in business leadership roles.

8.6 Conclusion

The evidence presented in this chapter demonstrates that there is a strong economic case for encouraging more women to work in the Arabian Gulf States, the broader MENA region and, indeed, in all emerging economies. The business case for gender diversity is also robust, although there may still be some uncertainties about the cumulative effect that women at the most senior levels have on corporate performance and bottom-line results. It is also significant that I have not come across a single study which has suggested that either the introduction of equal-opportunity legislation at the national level or introducing gender diversity policies at the company level have ever had any negative effects on either national economic growth or the performance of individual businesses. It appears then, as Deloitte and many others have suggested, that the debate about the cumulative macro-, meso- and micro-benefits of gender diversity are indeed ‘over’ and discrimination against women is, quite simply, bad for both national economic development and business performance. However, to reiterate the point, the evidence presented at the end of the preceding section also demonstrates that even in the world’s leading industrial economies, systemic gender inequities do persist, particularly at the most senior levels of organisations.

The Arabian Gulf States and the MENA region operate in a global economy, one characterised by increasing job mobility between countries, growing competition in all industrial and business sectors, perpetual change and rapid technological innovation. The management of intellectual capital and knowledge is becoming one of the most important drivers of organisational performance and adaptability in these fast-changing market environments (Avent, Reference Avent2016: 29–45 and 162–179). And this, in turn, is entirely dependent on the skills, abilities and engagement of employees. While most of the Arabian Gulf States and some other MENA countries still have a hydrocarbon cushion to rely on, this will not last forever and, as we have seen, the ‘end of oil’ is now firmly on the horizon for all of them. This means that every business operating in this region will have to consider how they are going to recruit and retain the very best talent, regardless of gender and ethnicity, in the future. If they do not, many of them will struggle to survive when the business opportunities and lucrative contracts generated by the region’s oil and gas sectors no longer exist (Ellis et al, Reference Ellis, Marcati and Sperling2015). And, if they have visionary and forward-thinking leaders, some of them will already be thinking about and planning for this inevitable scenario. These leaders will already understand that the main reason for changing negative attitudes and behaviours towards women is because it will be good for their businesses. They know that this will help them enhance employee performance and enable them to become more responsive to the markets and environments they operate in and, ultimately, this will improve the performance and profitability of their businesses. They will realise that this is true even if they might not consider moral, ethical or legal reasons to be sufficiently important reasons for employing more women and embracing the principle of gender diversity.

However, it is true to say that the majority of the Emirati, Omani and Saudi men that I interviewed between 2008 and 2015 expressed anxiety and uncertainty about what all this might mean for their traditional roles, their families and their societies. Some were genuinely afraid of what they regarded as the ‘feminisation’ of organisations and the ‘emasculation’ of their male identities. Being the head of the family and the principal breadwinner is such an integral and deeply ingrained part of the masculine psyche in Arabic-Muslim cultures that it will take a generation or two before they may become more accepting of less dominant roles (i.e. about the same length of time it has taken for this to happen in many non-Islamic countries). This, however, will not be easy for those men who do change how they think about working women and how they behave towards them, because as Sinclair has suggested:

However, if the societal trends that have emerged in the leading Western industrialised countries are repeated in the MENA region over the next two decades, the vast majority of men who live there will not be the sole breadwinners in their families with dependent stay-at-home wives who never work outside the home. Such a scenario would not be feasible in any economy in which most women do work. And it is apparent from the evidence and data presented in earlier chapters that attitudes towards working women are changing, perhaps slowly and not as quickly as many women would hope, but they are clearly evolving, particularly among younger educated Emiratis, Omanis and Saudis and among some local political and business leaders. It is this generational shift that is likely to have the greatest impact on traditional stereotypes about women and, when these do start to change, they can evolve very quickly. The main challenge that still lies ahead is how to create an alternative vision of women:

Consequently, unleashing the full economic potential of women in the MENA region will require strategies that go well beyond what this report described as ‘a merely symbolic makeover that permits a few distinguished Arab women to ascend to positions of leadership in state institutions.’ Rather, ‘this must extend to the empowerment of the broad masses of Arab women in their entirety … and full opportunities must be given to Arab women for effective participation in all types of human activity outside the family on an equal footing with their male counterparts’. If this does not happen, this report concluded that they would be unable to participate effectively ‘in the project for Arab Renaissance … and achieve the full blossoming of their potential and a better future for all’ (United Nations, 2005: 22, 24 and 220). How they can achieve this is described in the next chapter, but a good starting point can be found in a comment made by The Economist in 2014:

And, to repeat what has become a repetitive mantra in this book, it is not possible to imagine how this can be achieved without the active participation of many women in the nineteen countries of the MENA region in their political systems and, even more importantly, as equals with men in their economies and labour markets. A growing number of educated and liberal-minded women (and some men) no longer accept some of the core assumptions and values of the social and cultural systems they were born into, in particular the still-widespread view that women are somehow ‘dangerous’ to the established social order and must somehow be ‘contained’. These beliefs are mirrored in every study cited in this book, and the message from those is clear: the countries of the Gulf and the broader MENA region must find ways to remove the constraints that are still imposed on women and allow them to make the fullest possible contribution to the growth of their national economies in the future. Having said this, I remain doubtful that we might see job advertisements in the Gulf States and other countries in the MENA region in the near future that contain statements like this:

However, it is now at least possible and maybe even conceivable that governments and public- and private-sector leaders in the MENA region could address – in more proactive and systemic ways – the issues of women’s engagement in their national economies and also embrace the benefits of gender diversity in organisations; and we look at how they might be able to achieve this in Chapter 9.