At the end of April this year, I was proud to author the inaugural edition of the GCC Board Gender Index Report, showing how many women were on the boards of public companies across the GCC countries. One of the first emails I got after it was published was from someone I had never met, a lady who worked as an analyst in a major international bank.
She was a member of their investment management team, and was a specialist in Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) investments. Thank you so much, she said, for launching this index and committing to issuing it for the next three years because ‘it is so hard to get consistent data on ESG measures in the MENA region.’
I am pleased that we are helping others to celebrate companies that are pursuing gender progress. When I came to live in the United Arab Emirates in 2022, I already knew that they were committed to supporting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal #5, which seeks to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls. As a woman leading a university in the UAE, I was surrounded by female role models both in the government and in the private sector.
I also knew that the Securities and Commodities Association (SCA) had issued a decree in March 2021 that every public company should have a woman on the board, or explain why not, and in October of that year, a woman had even been appointed to lead the SCA itself – Dr. Maryam Al Suwaidi. What I found hard to access, though, was reliable data on the number of women on UAE public company boards, much less the boards in all the other GCC countries.
Why did I even need this? Because I was interested in looking at the data for my academic research. As a qualified management accountant, I have sat on the audit committees of multiple companies and am interested in looking at the role of women in board committees. But I can’t investigate women on board committees without first knowing which women are on boards.
Various reports have been published with varying degrees of usefulness. Deloitte, for instance, publishes a very useful annual review of women on boards from a global perspective, looking at all the major stock exchanges in the world, but omit Qatar and Oman because they have less than 100 companies each. This means the data cannot be aggregated to deliver a GCC Index.
So, my team and I set out to create the data from scratch. There are not thousands of quoted companies in the GCC, just 742. We set out to review 742 websites and all their directors, deduplicate, and build an authoritative database, all from publicly available data. Then we wrote to all the stock exchanges in the respective GCC countries to ask for their help in verifying the data before writing (up to three times, if they didn’t reply) to each and every company. We set our audit date as January 1st.
The result, the GCC Board Gender Index Report 2024, is a report that provides data on the representation of women on boards of publicly listed companies in the GCC. We published this jointly with the Aurora50, and its goals are to celebrate the progress of women on boards, elevate their profile, and provide a data source for researchers and scholars. That is why we describe the methodology and state the audit date so that if anyone wanted to, they could replicate it. (I am not sure anyone will – 742 websites take a lot of reading).
As I had hoped, we are now turning our attention to board committees and plan to publish a report on audit committees in the GCC in the autumn. We are only able to do this because we went to the trouble of identifying the basic data first.
I have no doubt that female representation on boards in the GCC will grow. But it needs to grow faster, and to effect that change, we need accurate data. Data is essential for effecting change because it provides a factual basis for understanding issues, informs decision-making, and measures progress.
Data-driven approach to driving gender inclusion
Data-driven decision-making ensures that policies and strategies are based on evidence rather than anecdotal information. Without data, efforts to effect change would lack direction, precision, and measurable outcomes. Interventions to encourage more gender inclusion, such as the one introduced in the UAE by the SCA in 2021, need to be assessed from the data to see if they have been successful.
Judging by the data for the UAE (11 percent of board seats are held by women) and the whole GCC region (5 percent), that intervention worked, even if there are still many boards in the UAE without a woman. Will there be more progress? The GCC Board Gender Index 2025 will be out at the end of April next year – the data will show and support the case for change.
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