Oman’s stock exchange has appointed two women to its seven-member board amid a push to boost gender diversity within the Gulf’s business community.
Samra Sulaiman Alharthy is the director of investment and economic research at the Oman Investment Authority and sits on the boards of Oman LNG, Qalhat LNG and Dubai Mercantile Exchange.
She has worked for over a decade at the state-owned wealth fund. Previously, she was a UK and eurozone economist at Standard Chartered in London, according to a statement from the investment authority, which owns the Muscat Securities Market.
Mathla Saleh Al Shaqsi is a senior associate of investments at the Oman Investment Authority. Before joining the fund, she was an assurance senior associate at PricewaterhouseCoopers, the statement said.
In the World Bank’s recently published Women, Business and the Law (WBL) Report, a global measure of female-focused legal reforms, Oman fared poorly compared to the UAE and Saudi Arabia.
Out of a score of 100, Oman tallied just 35.6, putting it well behind the UAE (82.5) and Saudi Arabia (80) and also below Bahrain (55.6). In the Gulf, only Qatar (29.4) and Kuwait (28.8) were deemed the least female-friendly country in the region, scoring just 28.8 out of 100.
Globally, the World Bank said countries are inching toward greater gender equality, but women around the world continue to face laws and regulations that restrict their economic opportunity, with the Covid-19 pandemic creating new challenges to their health, safety, and economic security.
Reforms to remove obstacles to women’s economic inclusion have been slow in many regions and uneven within them, according to its report which said, on average, women have just three-quarters of the legal rights afforded to men.
Women were already at a disadvantage before the pandemic, and government initiatives to buffer some of its effects, while innovative, have been limited in many countries, the report noted.
* With Bloomberg
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