Challenges Women Leaders Face in the Middle East

The gap is at the top, not in education

The World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report 2025 ranks the Middle East and Northern Africa eighth of eight regions, with an overall parity score of 61.7%. The same report places the region fifth globally on educational attainment, at 97.6%.

The distance shows up later. The region's score for economic participation and opportunity is 42.4%, and for political empowerment 10.5%, the lowest of any region. The report also notes wide differences between countries: Bahrain's economic participation score of 65.6% is among the highest in the region.

For a woman leader, the message is simple. The barrier is rarely qualification. It is what happens between graduating with strong results and reaching the rooms where big decisions are made.

Six challenges women leaders in the region describe most often

These are patterns, not rules. Many women face none of them, and men face some of them too. They are worth naming because a challenge you can name is one you can plan for.

Being one of very few women changes how you are seen

When a group has very few women, those women attract extra attention, are more often seen as representatives of their gender than as individuals, and can feel pressure to fit in. The sociologist Rosabeth Moss Kanter described this in her classic 1977 study of skewed sex ratios and token women in the American Journal of Sociology.

The effect is not unique to the Middle East, but it matters here because many women are still the first, or one of the first, in their roles. Knowing the pattern helps you treat the scrutiny as a feature of the situation rather than a judgement of your ability.

The landscape is changing fast, and that creates its own pressure

Structured investment in women's leadership is growing. INSEAD reports that its programme with Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University and the Saudi Ministry of Human Resources and Social Development trained around 1,700 women professionals from about 625 organisations between 2019 and 2022. London Business School has also reported a growing number of Saudi women participants in its executive education.

Legal and policy frameworks are moving too, and the World Bank's Women, Business and the Law project tracks those reforms country by country. Rapid change brings opportunity, but it can also mean promotion arrives before support structures do. A woman may be the first in her family or her organisation to hold a senior role, with nobody close by who has done it before.

What organisations can do

• ✦Look at where women leave or stall in your pipeline, not only at headline numbers.
• ✦Ask senior leaders to sponsor named women, with clear expectations of what sponsorship means.
• ✦Make flexible working and return-to-work support normal for senior roles, not exceptions.
• ✦Check whether promotion criteria reward visibility and self-promotion more than results.
• ✦Combine development for women with work on the leadership teams they are joining. A women's leadership programme for organisations can do both.

What you can do as an individual leader

You cannot change the regional data on your own, but you can change how you respond to the parts that touch your career. Start with the challenge that costs you most right now, rather than trying to fix everything at once.

Write down the three people whose opinion most affects your next move, and ask yourself whether each of them knows what you have achieved this year. Then choose one conversation, at work or at home, that you have been postponing, and plan it. Small, specific steps beat a general resolve to be more confident.

Example: a senior manager weighing a regional role

Imagine a senior manager in a Gulf bank who is offered a regional role that would make her the only woman on the leadership team. She is qualified and wants it, but she hesitates. She worries about travel, about being judged on every meeting, and about how her family will react.

A useful first step is to separate the three worries. The family question needs a conversation, not a guess. The visibility question needs preparation and an ally on the new team. The travel question needs facts about what the role actually requires. Taken apart, each worry becomes manageable, and the decision becomes a real choice rather than a reaction to fear.

When coaching helps with these challenges

Coaching helps when you know what you want but something keeps holding you back: a habit of waiting to be asked, a fear of seeming arrogant, or a conflict between expectations you have not said out loud. It gives you a confidential space to think it through and practise new responses in your real work.

I wrote about these questions with Amal Kooheji in Seen Yet Silent: Coaching Arab Women to Lead, and they shape my executive coaching for Arab women leaders, in Arabic or English.