Despite the barriers, 10 women executives from the Middle East made the World's 100 Most Powerful Women in Forbes Magazine ranking this year.
How are they managing to break through the glass ceiling?
Good old-fashioned capitalism has played a role. The economic liberalization of several Muslim countries in recent years, and the privatization of large chunks of government-run companies, have helped Muslim businesswomen get a greater foothold.
In the government sector, Muslim women are also winning posts. Sheikha Lubna Al-Qasimi (No. 99), minister of the economy in the United Arab Emirates, has cracked down on stock market shenanigans with tougher rules, transparency and corporate governance.
None of this means that the going is easy for Muslim professional women as a group. In 2002, the first Arab Human Development Report, issued by the United Nations Development Programme, found that women occupied an average of only 4% of all seats in the parliaments of Arab countries, compared with 11% in sub-Saharan Africa and 13% in Latin America and Caribbean countries. The report blamed these figures in part on women's inequality under the law, and also noted that just one in every two Arab women can read and write.
By delivering the bad news, though, the report may have had a galvanizing effect. It "really shocked everyone in the Arab world because it came from within," says Dr. Nailah Hamdy, assistant professor of mass communication at the American University in Cairo. That meant that the report's criticism of women's second-class status "could no longer be perceived as a foreign idea," she says.
For a lucky and determined few, opportunities do exist. "Just being a woman in our part of the world is quite difficult," says El-Sallab of Egypt's Commercial International Bank. "But if you have the proper education, credibility and integrity in the way you handle your job, intelligent men will always give you your due."
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