When Radwa Allabban took over her communications agency seven years ago, she did not originally intend it to be an all-female team.
But it quickly developed into one, and work which suited their strengths, skills and knowledge naturally followed.
Many of the agency’s current clients are women and the team of 10 helps to shine a light on female empowerment by acting on behalf of UN Women.
Ms Allabban, 43, who has worked in the sector for 20 years, distinctly remembers the uncomfortable feeling of being pregnant with her first child while working for a large company in London.
She never told her employer but felt so awkward that she eventually quit her job and moved to the Emirates in 2011.
“I started working for independent, smaller companies where I found there was a lot of support for women,” said Ms Allabban, a dual Egyptian-British citizen who has lived in the UAE for 11 years.
One of those boutique agencies is Place Communications in Abu Dhabi, for which she had been working for four years when she was offered the chance to buy it in 2015 when the workforce comprised a handful of women and one man.
After the co-owners exited, the company consisted of Ms Allabban and two other employees, both of whom were women.
She changed the direction of the business, from working for companies in the construction industry to non-profit organisations and similar industries.
“When you are as small as we were back then, you think how do you build the business around the strength of the people and the aspirations of the team,” said Ms Allabban, speaking on International Women’s Day.
“Very quickly, it became very obvious that our natural strengths as women was to go into impact communications.”
The business started working in tandem with one of the UN programmes in the UAE and started picking up related work in sustainability and other fields.
“As women, we tend to have perspective on these things,” she said.
“At the time we were four or five women. This is when this idea of being an all-women agency started evolving.”
It now has 10 members of nine nationalities: UK, Canada, Egypt, Iraq, Yemen, Jordan, Syria, India and the Philippines.
The company began working with UN Women in 2017.
“That really set the pace for us with UN Women being the agency tasked with supporting gender equality and putting the issues of women at the forefront. It seemed the perfect alignment for us because they are also mainly women,” Ms Allabban said.
She is often questioned whether the 10 employees and one intern bicker with each other because they are all women – absolutely not, she said.
Employees have a sense of solidarity and mission, and support each other in whatever it is they need flexibility for at the time, be it childcare, or even hobbies, she said.
“Our head of Arabic has three children and if they have exams, the Arabic-speaking team members will rally around her because they know she needs some flexibility during a period of time," she said.
“Our head of design is a professional violinist, so we know which events she is doing. We talk about it openly. She needs some flexibility as well because she had a few shows at Expo. We empower each other. It’s a great misconception that women fight when working together.”
The approach has helped her to retain staff in an industry which often has a high turnover rate. It lost no staff and made no salary cuts in 2020. And the only employee to leave in 2021 did so to move to the US.
Whether Place Communications continues to remain women-only is not certain – men are not excluded by any means, she said.
“That would be discrimination,” Ms Allabban said.
“It just happened that everyone who was included was perfect at what they do and they did happen to be women.
“And maybe because it’s the nature of what we do that we were looking for women with a very specific skill set.
“But importantly, we look for people with the right attitude and interest in the work we do.”
