Lighting the way

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Oprah Winfrey.

Although the female workforce in the Middle East is still the lowest worldwide - with around one third of the working population being women - developments and progress in recent years have been remarkable.

In the Gulf the UAE is clearly taking the lead, with two female ministers, nine female members of the Federal National Council and a large number of women in leading positions in government departments, ministries and the private sector. Women today represent 22.4% of the total UAE labour force - 66% of government jobs are held by women, 30% of which are decision-making posts - and the trend is certain to continue.

The percentage of girls enrolled in higher education has grown to a staggering 77%, and the numbers of women with Masters degrees and PhDs is on the increase.

A further phenomenon is that women are increasingly breaking into traditionally male-dominated industries, holding leadership positions in fields such as IT, banking and property development, often at a very young age.

Rula Abu Daher does not only oversee the technical division of a leading telecom operator - she is the Chief Technical Officer of Lebanese telecom operator MTC Touch - she is also what you could call something of a war hero.

During last summer's Israeli bombardment of the Lebanese infrastructure Abu Daher and her team went to the destroyed infrastructure sites to repair them with provisionary tools in minimum time.

"A huge part of Lebanon's GSM network was completely down. We thought that one phone call can save a life, and this belief pushed us to act as fast as possible. Me and my team rushed to the sites, it was crazy, the Israeli planes were on top of us and we could hear the sounds of the bombings," she recalls.

Abu Daher and the team then came up with creative ideas to temporarily restore the network. "The microwave hub in the north of the country was destroyed, which shut done a quarter of the entire GSM network. We installed tools like portable micro-cell ports that could carry connection again," she says.

And her success story only starts there - Abu Daher is one of the few women worldwide to hold the position of Chief Technical Officer. She has however come a long way to prove herself.

A graduate from the American University of Beirut with a bachelor degree in Computer, Communication, and Electrical Engineering, she was in her prior positions Radio Planning Senior Engineer at Libancell before joining MTC Touch where she first led the Radio and Transmission Planning department, and one year later, in 2005, she was appointed as Chief Technical Officer.

"The way this company and Lebanon works is that we need to be flexible and fast. In the time when Prime Minister Rafic Hariri was assassinated there were demonstrations almost every day, and they were often announced only one day in advance. In order to be efficient we needed to upgrade the network upon demand, whenever and wherever it was needed. That's why MTC Touch believes in hiring young, innovative talent who can work under special conditions," she explains.

Abu Daher was one of seven girls in her engineering class, as opposed to 35 boys. "It was a challenge for me to study something that was unconventional for women. My father raised me like this, he always made me believe I could do anything a man can do," she says.

She believes that women have to overcome barriers not only in the Middle East but world wide when trying to reach top positions. "In the whole world there are certain stereotypes of women and their capabilities. In the telecom sector there are only 3% females in senior positions world wide - virtually nothing. I was always keen on fighting this henomena."

She says that although we do live in a male-dominated world, women should challenge and prove themselves. "Women need to put in more effort, and you most never give up," she says.

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