Women are vastly underrepresented in corporate boardrooms in the Middle East, North Africa and Turkey, although some countries such as the UAE and Morocco have taken steps to boost their presence, a report has found.
More than half of all listed companies have all-male boards, according to the latest report by Corporate Women Directors International, a body that promotes women’s participation in corporate boards globally.
Women hold only 8.6 per cent of board seats in 1,148 listed companies in the 16 Menat economies that were included in the study.
Most of the companies in the region do not recognise the benefits of gender diversity in boardrooms, said the report, released on the second day of the 2023 Global Summit of Women in Dubai.
Menat trails all others regions in appointing women to board positions, with the second-lowest ranked region, Latin America, having 14.5 per cent of board positions held by women.
About 33 per cent of companies in Europe have women occupying board seats. The US and Canada have 32 per cent representation, followed by Africa at 19.1 per cent and Asia-Pacific having 16.2 per cent, the study showed.
Out of a total of 9,051 board seats of listed companies included in the study, women occupy only 779 positions.
With men holding 91.4 per cent of directorships, boardrooms in the Menat region are overwhelmingly male-dominated.
The “complete absence [of women] on the boards of the majority of companies in the region is even more striking”, the study said.
“In fact, 55.5 per cent of the 1,148 companies have all-male boards … most companies may not yet recognise the benefits of gender diversity on corporate boards.”
Clearly, there is “ample room for improvement”, the study said.
Despite being at the bottom of global ranking currently, Menat may be at the cusp of change in terms of corporate boardroom gender diversity, driven by policy measures taken by several governments in the region.
Though the Menat region currently “pales in comparison to other parts of the world, it is important to recognise that its overall percentage is where other regions and some of today’s top-performing countries were just over a decade ago,” the report pointed out.
A decade ago, Asia-Pacific’s largest companies had only 5.9 per cent representation of women on their boards, lower than Menat’s current percentage. That percentage has now increased nearly threefold to 16.2 per cent.
“Menat may just be newer to the gender-diversity-on-boards effort,” the report said.
Seven of the regional economies have proactively put in place several strategies to “move the needle on enabling women’s access to board seats in their listed companies — UAE, Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia, Bahrain and Turkey”, the report added.
The UAE, the Arab world’s second-largest economy, became the first country in the Menat region to mandate a quota for women in corporate boardrooms.
Listed companies in the UAE have more than doubled the number of women on their boards since 2020 as part of the country's efforts to improve gender diversity in corporations.
Women held 77 seats in the boardrooms of listed companies in 2022, up from 29 seats in 2020, a study by Aurora50 showed.
Women accounted for 8.9 per cent of the 868 board seats of the 115 companies listed on the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange and the Dubai Financial Market as of June 2022, up from 3.5 per cent in 2020, the report showed.
The UAE was ranked first among Arab countries in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2022. It advanced four spots in one year, rising from the 72nd position to 68th globally.
The less than 9 per cent overall representation of women on boards, however, masks a wide divergence between the 16 Menat countries ranging from a high of 18.2 per cent to a low of 1.8 per cent, the report said.
Topping the rankings is Morocco, where women make up 18.2 per cent of board seats at the 100 largest listed companies. Turkey follows with 17.9 per cent female representation.
“While these numbers may seem underwhelming, their percentages outpace a number of countries within the regional leader — the EU — namely Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Malta, Estonia and Cyprus,” the report said.
Egypt has the third-highest percentage in the region with 15.9 per cent women directors, followed by Algeria at 14.7 per cent and Tunisia at 10.5 per cent.
The UAE, which has the highest percentage of women holding board seats in the six-member GCC economic bloc, ranks sixth overall, with women holding 7.6 per cent of director positions in companies listed on the Dubai Financial Market and the Abu Dhabi Securities.
Syria follows the UAE with 6.6 per cent, Iraq with 5.8 per cent, Palestine with 5.7 per cent, Jordan with 5.2 per cent, and Oman has 5.1 per cent representation of women in boardrooms.
Countries with less than 5 per cent representation include Kuwait (4.8 per cent), Lebanon (4.5 per cent), Bahrain (4.2 per cent), Saudi Arabia (2.9 per cent) and Qatar (1.8 per cent).
