SME profile: A web platform to help women rise in the workplace

Khadija Alduwaik, right, and Najwa Allawi founded Amalkum on the premise that working life is changing for professional women with high aspirations. Mona Al Marzooqi / The National

Social changes sweeping through the world’s workplaces have been the seeds for many a start-up, and such was the case for Amalkum.com, which bills itself as an online platform for professional women in the United Arab Emirates.

The brainchild of Najwa Allawi, an Iraqi, and Khadija Alduwaik, an Emirati, the business is founded on the premise that working life is changing for professional women with high aspirations, and especially for Gulf Arab women upon whom much expectation rests as regional governments seek to step up the pace of diversification and transformation of the local economies.

“When people talk about gender diversity and parity they tend to talk about it with a negative connotation, about how much there is still to do,” says Ms Alduwaik. “But now more Emirati women graduate than men and I think we’ve done very well in the context of education. What we are finding with the workforce, though, is at the bottom of the career ladder there are more females than males, but once you get to the chief executive, president and board levels, that is where you find the males still dominating. So, it is about taking it to the next level.”

The platform idea is for Amalkum to be more than just a jobs board but rather a forum for discussing the evolving needs of professional women and matching them with the needs of the companies that are seeking them out.

The germ of the idea came out of Ms Allawi’s time as a consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers and a project where she interviewed women across the UAE to understand the underlying issues that were holding them back from participating fully in the workforce.

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“So, we came up with the idea of starting a platform that promotes this concept to be the voice for women in the region and to help them find opportunities that best suit their needs,” Ms Alduwaik says.

The original conversations about the business also built on experiences Ms Allawi had in her home country, where she had been active in social and political research in seeking to further women’s empowerment.

“I was working as a strategy consultant for one of the main political parties in Baghdad – the Iraqi National Movement – to develop a tailor-made strategy for the elections that took place in 2014,” she recounts.

“My role included doing a detailed assessment analysis of the political environment and competition, the different political parties … We designed and implemented an integrated social media marketing platform focused to target the youth and I was able to promote women’s rights, particularly among the skilled and educated with internet access in urban areas, who form a large constituency of this party.

“We advocated for larger female representation in the state (including government and parliament) as well as a mandatory minimum quota system. In fact, the head of our party was the former interim prime minister [Ayad Allawi], whose government was the first to have six female ministers in his cabinet, the largest in Iraq and the Middle East.

“With diminishing rights in Iraq after the war, I continue with this political party, cooperating with international organisations for women empowerment and in trying to improve the welfare of women with a focus on providing the right to a sound education. This has inspired me to take on this initiative – Amalkum.com – as maybe to set a model for the Middle East, which has begun to realise the importance of women in the workplace and their contribution to society,” Ms Allawi says.

Closer to home, Ms Alduwaik says she draws inspiration from Sheikha Lubna Al Qasimi, the UAE’s first female government minister.

“She has been a pioneer for women in education and excelling in the workforce,” she says. “I think for our generation it is a lot easier than before. There are so many women graduating from universities, a growing number with Stem [science, technology, engineering, mathematics] degrees, and companies want to expand their gender diversity.”

There is also greater acceptance of flexible working arrangements by employees and companies.

Amalkum looks to match up the specific requirements of women with third-level (bachelor’s) degrees, which is essential to be registered with the site, and potential employers. Issues such as whether work environments are segregated also taken into account.

Among the big companies to sign up for launch were Royal Dutch Shell, Ernst & Young and the law firm Al Tamimi & Co.

The founders simultaneously have been signing up the region’s universities and building a jobseeker database.

The plans are to give it six months initially for those advertising on the site to gain traction before a harder launch.

The focus will initially be the larger job centres of Dubai and Abu Dhabi, but it will cover all the emirates soon after launch and then looking for regional expansion, including into Ms Allawi’s troubled homeland.

“Iraq is my country and it is one of the markets I would look to enter in the next few years if the situation improves,” Ms Allawi says. “The empowerment of women is critical for economic development and prosperity, which is needed for Iraq.”

That is true, too, for Saudi Arabia and its recently announced plan that includes ambitious targets to raise employment levels for women in general, and especially for highly qualified ones in fields such as health care, technology and science-related fields.

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