Women hold just 1.5% of GCC board seats

REPRESENTATION LACKING: Women hold just 1.5% of GCC boardroom seats, TNI said. (Getty Images)

Women hold just 1.5% of boardroom seats in the GCC and are being held back from leading positions of influence in business by social and religious reasons, research by UAE banking group The National Investor (TNI) has revealed.

The report, published on Monday, found that out of 582 companies in the GCC, with 3,493 individuals occupying 4,254 board seats, women hold only 63 seats.

Saudi Arabia had the lowest percentage of female representation in the boardroom, with just one of 786 seats, or 0.1%, in the ultra conservative Muslim kingdom occupied by women.

Kuwait and Oman were found to have the most female representatives in boardroom, with 2.7% and 2.3% respectively. Kuwait has a total of 30 female board seats out of 1,101, while Oman has 21 out of 905.

Dubai was found to have the third highest percentage of female representation (1.2%), followed by Bahrain (1%), Abu Dhabi (0.6%) and Qatar (0.3%).

TNI said social and religious factors provided "an easy, obvious justification for differences in female economic representation".

The company said it would be expected that countries with a highly patriarchal structure would have little board representation.

Similarly, TNI said it would be expected that countries where religion plays a dominant roll in society would show little female participation.

TNI said the small representation of women looked "minuscule" in comparison to the US (13.6%) and Norway (22%), but was actually higher than several developed nations.

In Japan, a culturally patriarchal society, women occupy just 0.4% of all board seats, while in Italy, where the strong influence of the Catholic Church has a significant effect on the participation of women in business, female representation in the boardroom is only 2%.

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