MIDEAST: Despite Exceptions, Region Misses Out on Women’s Potential

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Peyman Pejman

DUBAI, Sep 24 2003 (IPS) - If you listen to what she says, she sounds like any chief executive officer in London, Paris, or California’s technology belt.

She believes her primary responsibility is to the shareholders and to increase the profitability of the company she leads. She believes women must bear the brunt of the criticism for their lack of progress in the world because they do not push the envelope far enough to make men give them what they deserve, and because they do not fight discriminatory social norms.

Her idea of fun is sitting in front of a computer on a weekend morning with a big pot of gourmet coffee and surfing the Internet.

But she does not live in London, Paris, or California. She does not dress in a suit or above-knee skirt. She wears a neck-to-toe black robe over an equally- long dress, neither of which is long enough to cover her high-heel shoes.

When in public, she covers her henna-red neck-length hair with a black scarf. At the office or when travelling abroad, the scarf is off.

She is Sheikha Lubna bin Qasimi, and she lives in the United Arab Emirates, an Arab country on the banks of the Persian Gulf. Qasimi is chief executive officer of the semi-governmental al-Tijari, the Middle East’s leading electronic business-to-business marketplace.

Perhaps the country’s highest-profile woman, Qasimi is one of the best examples of mixing sheer eloquence and no-nonsense business attitude with modest religiosity and true beliefs in culture and Islamic values.

She says: "What you need is to have the kind of leadership that says we want women to participate. Once that happens, it will permeate throughout the society. We are lucky in Dubai because the leadership has gone even much further when it comes to empowering women."

She rubs shoulders freely with men of power and social status, but considers militant feminism a disservice to the cause of women’s liberation from political and social yokes.

In other words, she is an exception to what a recent report published by the World Bank said is wrong with women’s situation in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.

"Addressing gender issues is increasingly important for the Middle East and North Africa, where sizeable gender inequality remains and undermines development potential," said the report, ‘Gender Development in the Middle East and North Africa’.

The report, while giving credit to the governments in the region for increasing public spending education and public health, blames them for not creating the atmosphere that would allow women to enhance their social and political profile and making women like Qasimi an exception.

"What we are trying to emphasise in this report is that women are not as utilised in the public sphere as they should have been," Nadereh Shamlou, the report’s author, told IPS.

One of the points much emphasised in the report is that such lack of utilisation not only has social implications but it actually hurts local economies.

"The MENA economies, no longer able to rely on oil, remittances, and public sector to drive growth, must look to new models of growth and development that rely heavily on exports and private investment and that make more productive use of their non-oil resources, especially human resources," the report says.

While the countries of the Middle East and North Africa boast 63 percent female university graduates, women’s share of the work force remains limited at 32 percent.

Shamlou says that if women had full access to economic opportunities, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of their respective countries would have increased 0.7 percent.

"That may sound like an unimportant figure but in terms of economics, especially at a time when a lot of these countries are having high population growth, even 0.1 percent is a high amount," she says.

The reasons why women are not taken more seriously in the economic and political sphere in this part of the world are subject to wide debate.

The World Bank, published to coincide with the Dubai meeting of the board of governors of the Bank and International Monetary Fund here, studies the problem primarily from social and economic perspectives.

Others are quick to throw religion and its tight hold on the society in this part of the world into the ring.

"Islam gives equal rights to women. Women can own property. Women can receive education. Women can own a business. But a lot of times culture can superimpose religion. This is a social problem and the fact that there are various interpretations of the religion," Qasimi says.

That may be true, but as long as there are dogmatic rulers in places like Iran, Kuwait, or Saudi Arabia, the world maybe excused for bringing Islam into the equation when discussing the fate of half of the population.

"I am depressed because every time we discuss women’s development, we bring Islam to the table. We don’t bring Islam to the table when we discuss the gloomy employment situation. We don’t bring Islam to the table when we discuss economic development," an agitated Kuwaiti woman told a panel discussing the World Bank report here this week.

The reason why Islam enters the equation every time, says Asma Khader, a Jordanian lawyer, is that the constitution of almost all Arab countries is based on Islam and ‘shariah’ or Islamic jurisprudence, is the official legal source of the governments.

So while that remains the case, many observers here and the World Bank report argue, the onus falls on the shoulders of Arab leaders to navigate their countries through the turbulent religious arguments and land the populace in safety by providing the kind of social and political leadership that has allowed women like Qasimi to prosper.

"We are a new nation and that has worked for women and the leadership has been wise enough to allow women to participate so the whole country can benefit," says Qasimi.