Working women in the Gulf Cooperation Council

May 29, 2012 - PRLog -- Only months after graduating, Fatima is working on her employer's major sponsorship programme. The 26-year-old Emirati, who gained a bachelor's degree in Marketing in Dubai in 2011, now plans to get a master's degree. But she wasn't always this ambitious.

"Before, I didn't think about work. I thought work was for men and women raised families, but seeing other women working, it encouraged me," she says. "Now I like to work, even after marriage." Her decision to work is not based on financial considerations. "When you are at home, you're doing nothing and I would lose my confidence," says Fatima, who did not want her last name to be used.

The transformation of Fatima's opinion about the role of women in the jobs market is encouraging for the nations of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) as each seeks ways to reduce its dependency on oil and natural gas and increase the participation of its nationals to make it less reliant on expatriate workers.  Moreover, the GCC nations are eager to get returns on their significant investment in educating women.

The GCC countries - Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates - have made great strides in educating women. A recent study, Maximising GCC Women's Employment and Economic Contribution (http://www.cassknowledge.com/inbusiness/feature/working-w...) by British and Gulf academics, including Chris Rowley, Professor of Human Resource Management at Cass, found that in many GCC countries women university graduates outnumber men.

In conservative Saudi Arabia, which has many social and legal restrictions on women such as banning them from driving, the female literacy rate and the percentage of women who hold university degrees are high. In the more liberal UAE and Qatar they are higher still. In fact, more women than men have degrees. And the weighting is likely to remain in their favour as women comprise 60% of university students across all GCC nations.

However, the success in bridging the gender gap in education is not reflected in the workforce. The study found that women comprise only 19.2% - fewer than one in five - of the workforce in the GCC economies. This means that the countries are underusing a significant resource that could otherwise contribute greatly to their ambitions.

Professor Rowley says that if more professional women were in the workforce in the GCC area, it would change the cultural barriers that now exist but "only partly and long-term, as cultures, by their nature, are long held and slow moving."

The Oxford Strategic Consulting report was compiled by Professor Chris Rowley (http://www.cassknowledge.com/research/author/chris-rowley), Director of the Centre for Research in Asian Management at Cass (http://www.cassknowledge.com/); and Professor William Scott-Jackson, Bashar Kariem, Andrew Porteous and Amira Harb of OSC.