The kind of leaders the world needs, I’ve been working with them in the UAE

Last June, I was travelling with friends: Willie, a South African entrepreneur, and his wife Imen, who is Tunisian. Both live in Dubai, like me. We stopped in Copenhagen a day before flying to Milan for a friend’s wedding, and over coffee, the conversation turned to leadership. Society, Willie said, has spent decades telling women that, to succeed, they must adopt a patriarchal construct of leadership: be strong, do not compromise, speak up, claim the room, be like a man. What we lost in the process, he argued, were qualities women had often been encouraged to suppress: nurture, wisdom, care, listening and support. We treated them as weaknesses. We are now learning that they are sources of real power. It took me years to notice something about my own workplace. My boss is a woman. Her boss is a woman. Her boss is a woman. That chain runs all the way up through the media sector itself. I never noticed because it never felt unusual. That ordinariness may be the most significant achievement of all. For decades, the global model of women’s advancement followed one script: grant access, then measure how well women adapted to systems designed without them. It promised inclusion. It delivered assimilation. The UAE built a different foundation. In 1975, Her Highness Sheikha Fatima bint Mubarak, the Mother of the Nation, established the General Women’s Union, placing women’s education and participation inside the national development project rather than alongside it, on the understanding that the state would be built by women and men together. Four decades later, that premise was given an institutional engine. The UAE Gender Balance Council was established in 2015 under the leadership of Her Highness Sheikha Manal bint Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum. Mona Al Marri has served as its Vice President since its founding, alongside leading the Government of Dubai Media Office. The Council translated commitment into policy, legislation, measurement and institutional practice. The UAE now ranks first in the Arab world and thirteenth globally on the UNDP Gender Inequality Index, ahead of European countries that opened the conversation a century earlier. The results are measurable. A 2021 ruling required every listed public joint-stock company to include at least one woman on its board, and the requirement has since been extended to private joint-stock companies. Women’s seats on the boards of listed companies have tripled, rising from 47 to 141. Women occupy two-thirds of public-sector jobs and thirty per cent of its leadership positions. They hold half the seats in the Federal National Council. Equal pay is federal law. When the UAE reached Mars, women made up eighty per cent of the Hope Probe science team. Shamma Al Mazrui entered the Cabinet in 2016 at the age of twenty-two, becoming the youngest government minister in the world. Willie’s point was that the qualities once dismissed as feminine, the instinct to notice, to steady, to listen and to carry someone through, are what this century demands from its leaders. These qualities do not belong exclusively to women, just as courage, authority and decisiveness do not belong exclusively to men. The point is not to replace one model of leadership with another. It is to allow women and men to lead without suppressing part of themselves. By then, Willie’s words had followed me back to Dubai, and I realised I had been witnessing what he meant in my own workplace all along. During the recent conflict, my boss, Reem Al Marri, worked from morning until Iftar, went home to break her fast, then returned to the newsroom and stayed until the Fajr adhan, overseeing every bulletin through every wave of strikes. She also knew that I lived alone. After each interception, my phone would light up with a message from her confirming that the missiles had been intercepted and that everyone was safe. Eighteen hours into her working day, she was still thinking about who might be sitting alone in the dark. On some nights, without my saying anything, she sensed that I was still awake and worried. She would send me an article and begin discussing it with me. Somewhere in the discussion, I would forget to listen for the sky. She never called any of that leadership. She would probably call it Tuesday. Willie described the leaders the world is still waiting for. I have been working with them all along. --- (Naoufer Ramoul is a senior TV presenter and producer at Dubai Media Incorporated, and the host of the award-winning political show Qabel lil Niqash on Dubai TV. She has worked as a presenter at Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya and Alhurra.)