The business outlook for Arab Women

Here's the stark reality: the Arab world has the lowest proportion of working women in the world. Women form less than a quarter of the Gulf's national workforce, and just 29 percent of the labor force in the Arab Mediterranean rim countries: Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Syria and Tunisia.

However, the latter figure excludes female casual labor, agricultural production and domestic work. A new report, The Integration of Women's Rights into the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership, concludes that women's hidden economic contribution 'reinforces their inferior status in society.'

In the era of globalization, the Arab world - as the 2002 Arab Human Development Report (AHDR) points out - is at a crossroads. The report questions whether Arab states can prepare their citizens to meet the demands of global markets in a new, post-oil era. The report ranked the Arab world lowest, except for sub-Saharan Africa, in terms of gender empowerment, measured as access to political power, personal incomes and entry into the professions.

The AHDR argues that the need to empower women is among the three main barriers to Arab development, along with the need for greater personal and collective freedom and the need to improve Arab citizens' skills in relation to their incomes.

Although the future role of Arab and Muslim women will be partly shaped by cultural debates, those are arguments for theologians. In purely practical terms, there is a growing need for Arab women to support themselves - a need that governments have been slow to acknowledge.

The expansion of the female Arab workforce over the past three decades is undeniable. But are women working to secure their independence, to fulfill family expectations or to alleviate financial hardship in a developing world characterized by the feminization of poverty?

'The issue of women's employment is complex: simply having a higher rate of female employment does not necessarily reflect a higher degree of female development,' the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership study claims. 'It is critical to analyze the type and context of women's employment to understand why women are allowed, able or forced to work.'

Since the expansion of education across the Arab world in the 1970s, women's literacy levels have improved three-fold. But in 2003, one in every two Arab women is illiterate, and this will take a generation to eradicate.

While 75 percent of Arab girls enroll in primary schools, only 50 percent complete secondary education. Although more women than men graduate from universities in the UAE, Kuwait, Oman and Bahrain, this bucks trends across the 22 nations that form the Arab world.

Today, pressures on public spending have reduced earlier Arab governments' commitments to state education. The AHDR fears that access to quality education will revert to a privilege of the wealthy. Arab women are excluded from political power, occupying just 3.5 percent of all parliamentary seats. Moroccan women hold 35 of the House of Representatives' 325 seats. Syria comes next with 25 female members of parliament, just 10 percent of the total.

Political exclusion shapes regional governments' commitment to advancing the status of women. Eight Arab countries have not signed the 1979 International Convention on Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW).

But nowhere is the gap between what Arab governments say and what they do more evident than when it comes to women's rights. The Arab Parliamentary Union declared 2000 the Year of the Arab Woman.

However, Human Rights Watch notes that even 'countries that have signed or ratified CEDAW - Iraq, Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Libya, Algeria, Tunisia, Yemen and Saudi Arabia - maintain national laws that contradict the spirit and letter of CEDAW.'

The 2001 Human Rights Watch annual report noted: 'Instead of governments adopting reform policies to address discrimination and violence against women, women's rights have become a chip in political negotiations between conservative and liberal forces in society, and [government inaction] has unfortunately prevailed.'

Just 10 years ago, it was considered unseemly for journalists to highlight the achievements of individual non-royal Arab women. Today, Arab governments are falling over themselves to push female role models out of the shadows to inspire the national workforce. And yet groundbreaking achievements by Arab women this year alone only highlight the extent to which most women remain excluded from legal, political and corporate power.

This year saw Egypt appoint its first female judge to the Supreme Constitutional Court and Jordan allocate six new parliamentary seats to women, becoming only the second Arab state - after Morocco - to introduce parliamentary quotas for women. Kuwait proclaimed Ghada Al Issa the first woman appointed to head a $50 million Kuwaiti corporation.

Oman named its first female minister, appointing Sheikha Aisha to chair the General Commission for Artisan Ministries. Sheikha Aisha is the second female minister in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), following the appointment in Qatar of royal family member Hassa bint Khalifa Al Thani.

Without detracting from these pioneering achievements, it is disappointing that 30 years of expanded female education has delivered a lone female Egyptian supreme court judge, just two female GCC ministers and one female captain of Kuwaiti industry.

High birth rates combined with an economic slowdown have reduced average Arab per capita income growth to 0.5 percent a year - lower than any other developing region. It will take Arab men and women 140 years to double their income, a process that takes just 10 years in other developing countries.

United Nations research shows that while Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Oman, Sudan, Syria and Tunisia achieved economic growth in the last decade, the economies of Algeria and Bahrain were stagnant, and the economies of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Yemen, Kuwait and Iraq have slumped. The Arab world's combined GDP stands at $531.2 billion, less than that of Spain at $595.5 billion. Although there is less dire poverty - defined as an income of less than a dollar a day - one in five Arabs lives on less than $2 a day.

Arab economies need to achieve annual growth of five percent to absorb the unemployed and the 6 million youngsters who enter the region's workforce each year; annual growth has averaged 3.3 percent in recent years. Some 20 million Arabs are unemployed, a figure that conceals widespread female unemployment.

'There is an urgent need to reverse the feminization of unemployment by removing gender bias in the labor markets, including gender-based occupational segregation and wage differentials and by addressing gender gaps in the quality and relevance of education and training,' the AHDR 2002 reports.

Saudi industrialist Lubna Olayan ranks high birth rates among the challenges facing Arab economies. As chief executive of the Olayan Group, she recently launched a women's division to recruit under-used Saudi female talent. Olayan argues that educating and employing women will curb population growth.

'Some 200,000 people enter the Saudi workforce every year,' Olayan says. 'If there aren't enough jobs created, we face real social problems. We need to increase investment in Saudi businesses to absorb these young people, and to cut population growth.

'If women are educated and working, it's a natural way to reduce the birth rate. The role of women is clearly very important. There are many great women out there in the Arab world - women with great potential. As employers, we have to take advantage of this.'

Rising regional divorce rates and later marriages require growing numbers of women to support themselves. Yet women are excluded from high-paying professions, held back from promotion and subject to unequal pay. Evidence suggests that women bear the brunt of Arab public-sector cutbacks and are the first casualties in low-paid or casual private-sector job cuts.

Arab women still lack the tools to compete. A recent study in the UAE reported that local women lacked relevant qualifications, English language and IT skills, and needed to develop corporate interpersonal skills, yet nearly a fifth of Emirati women wanted to start a business and more than a quarter wanted more family support for their careers.

Respondents complained that split shifts interfered with family commitments, and noted widespread discrimination - particularly when it came to promotion. They called for free training, separate women's departments and moves to eliminate patronage.

In the post-oil era, competition for jobs will intensify. Free-trade agreements are forcing open Arab economies, ending protection for ailing national enterprises. Arab governments are trimming bloated departments and handing over activities to competitive private-sector firms. While new technologies open new opportunities for women, governments must equip future generations with relevant skills.

High average regional birth rates at around 3.5 percent mean that the Arab world is sitting on a population time bomb. A survey in Dubai in 2000 found that illiterate women had twice as many children as female graduates. Encouraging women to work is a way to reduce birth rates while tapping under-used talent.

It cannot be taken for granted that Arab women's rights will evolve naturally. Women who break through the glass ceiling may face renewed hostility in future from men as competition for jobs intensifies. But if women cannot enter the workplace on an equal footing, the prospect of growing poverty among Arab families - that will itself provoke a new cycle of social discontent in generations to come - seems all too real.