Every August, a version of the same article appears. It notes how many Emirati women are entering science and engineering, observes that the figures compare well internationally and expresses the hope that more girls will follow. This is accurate, but such an observation is not the real story.
The UAE settled the participation question years ago. Official figures show 56 per cent of Stem graduates from this country’s universities are women, and women account for about seven in 10 university graduates overall – exceeding the totals recorded in most of the rest of the world. If the task in front us of was to persuade young Emirati women that science is open to them, we could reasonably declare that job is done.
Here are the numbers that should occupy us. Women hold about two thirds of public sector positions in this country. They hold roughly 30 per cent of leadership roles within it and about 15 per cent of technical and academic ones. There is no shortage of ambition in that gap. Ambition is what got those women into the lecture hall in the first place, often facing more resistance than the statistics record.
What the gap describes is a failure of conversion, and conversion is an institutional responsibility, not a personal one.
Let me be precise about what I mean by conversion. The decisive moment in a scientific career is rarely the job offer. It is the first time someone is handed a decision that cannot be cheaply reversed. For example, which of three architectures a system will be built on? Which problem a laboratory will commit three years to? How will a research budget be allocated when there are two credible options and only one can be funded?
That is where technical authority lives. Someone who is never given a decision can spend a decade doing excellent work and still arrive at 40 having been, in institutional terms, permanently junior.
The people setting research priorities in advanced technology today are determining how artificial intelligence is built and used, how digital infrastructure will be protected once quantum computers can break the encryption surrounding it, and what autonomous systems will be permitted to make decisions for themselves. Those are questions about the kind of society we intend to live in, dressed in the costume of technical specifications.
I remember the first time I was asked to make a technical decision related to post-quantum cryptography, knowing that its consequences would outlast the meeting in which it was made. I had spent years being evaluated on whether my analysis was correct, whether my research was rigorous and whether I could solve the problem in front of me. This was different. There were several defensible paths, incomplete information and no senior person waiting to provide the “right” answer. The decision was mine.
What stayed with me was not the technical choice itself. It was what happened afterwards – the institution acted on it. People committed time, resources and their own work to a direction I had chosen. That was the moment I understood the difference between being valued for your expertise and being trusted with authority. The first makes you a good scientist. The second gives you the opportunity to become a leader.
At the Technology Innovation Institute, I have seen what is possible when people are given that authority early, rather than after a decade of waiting for it. Teams in Abu Dhabi have built open-source AI models that compete with anything produced in far larger research ecosystems, developed cryptography intended to hold against machines that do not yet exist, and launched the UAE’s first sounding rocket on a hybrid propulsion system designed, tested and operated entirely in this country. None of this would be possible without putting difficult problems in the hands of people young enough to still be told they are not ready.
Do not ask an institution how many women it employs. Ask how many of its research directions were chosen by one.
This is where the occasion and the year meet. Announcing this year’s theme for Emirati Women’s Day, Sheikha Fatima bint Mubarak, Mother of the Nation, called on national institutions to treat flexibility as an advanced approach to supporting women, particularly working mothers and those caring for elderly parents.
The years in which a scientist is handed her first significant technical authority are, with unhelpful precision, the same years in which she is most likely to be raising young children. An institution that quietly stops assigning consequential work to someone during that decade has not made a scheduling adjustment. It has made a decision about her career.
This is the UAE’s Year of Family. Families are where ambition is first noticed and taken seriously. Institutions inherit that work. We can either build on it or spend a generation’s worth of talent discovering that it does not survive contact with us.
Some of this is straightforward. Through the ATRC School Programme, pupils across Abu Dhabi now meet working scientists and see functioning laboratories. A 15-year-old sees shiny facilities and futuristic technology, and watches a woman explain what her team is building, realising (without anyone having to say it) that the person setting the direction is a woman.
Representation makes that possible, but not inevitable. So I would retire the pipeline metaphor. It suggests the only real task is working at one end and waiting. The interesting question now is what happens in the middle, where careers are made or quietly capped, and that question belongs to those of us who run institutions rather than to the young women arriving in them.
Najwa Aaraj is chief executive of the Technology Innovation Institute
