Barriers remain high for women seeking jobs in the Middle East

• Lack of care facilities for elderly
• Few options for child care
• Unsafe transport

A “shocking” lack of care facilities for the elderly, few options for childcare, unsafe transport and poor access to credit all combine to make it hard for even highly educated women in the Middle East and North Africa to progress in their careers.

That is the belief of Hela Cheikhrouhou, a senior official with the International Finance Corporation, the arm of the World Bank Group that works with the private sector in emerging markets.

Cheikhrouhou, the IFC’s regional vice-president for the Middle East, Central Asia, Turkey, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and a former minister of energy, mining and renewables in Tunisia, says: “I wouldn’t accept to put my mother in an old people’s home; it’s not done in our region, so you would need to find alternatives.”

When services are insufficient or absent, the weight of caring for older and sicker relatives, as well as young children, still falls nearly entirely on women, Cheikhrouhou said during a talk last week hosted by the Wilson Center in Washington, DC. 

As both local and expat populations age in the Middle East, including the Gulf, demand for services for seniors, from targeted health care to supportive housing, is growing. However, providers are only slowly increasing their offering. 

Cheikhrouhou said that alongside this, unsafe public transport impedes women’s ability to arrive at the workplace to begin with. 

That has been the case in Jordan, she added, which, at 14 percent, has one of the world’s lowest proportions of women with jobs, according to International Labour Organization data. 

Almost half of Jordanian women interviewed for a study in 2018 said they had rejected job opportunities because of concerns about public transport, the World Bank has revealed. 

This is increasingly in contrast with the progress the country has made in educating women.

Merissa Khurma, director of the Wilson Center’s Middle East programme, said at the event: “In my home country of Jordan, there are more women in tertiary education and they’re outperforming men, but that’s not translating to the workforce.”

The Mena region generally fares poorly for the share of women with jobs, with countries such as Egypt, Algeria and Morocco at between 16 and 18 percent in 2023, the ILO data shows.

Bahrain, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar are exceptions, with working women numbering between 44 percent and 65 percent of total female residents. 

Even there, however, these figures still pale in comparison to men’s, and gradually decrease as seniority increases, the World Bank found. 

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The gender gap is particularly acute in entrepreneurship, Cheikhrouhou said at the Wilson Center.

“Globally, one in four businesses are led by women,” she said. “When it comes to our region, it’s five in a hundred. So it’s five times less.”

Women filled more than one in 10 of board seats at listed companies in the UAE last year. That is double the wider GCC average, but well below the estimated one in four of board seats occupied by women at large and mid-cap firms globally.

As of January, Emirati private joint-stock companies are required to appoint at least one woman to their board of directors, the UAE’s Ministry of Economy said in September.

Cheikhrouhou said last week that other interventions that can help to increase female employment in the Middle East include flexible working hours, and more bank branches, financial technology companies, credit officers and Islamic finance products dedicated explicitly to serving aspiring businesswomen.