At the 2014 celebration of Omani Women’s Day, celebrated annually since 2009, Zahra Al Ajmia, president of the Muscat Business Women’s Centre (MBWC), said during a speech on the topic of women in business: “Women certainly got special attention from His Majesty Sultan Qaboos bin Said Al Said, because of their effective role in the society, which is proven by their achievements in all fields.”
Indeed, as noted by Al Ajmia, in recent years women have taken on an increasingly important role in Oman in terms of economic activity, participation in government and, more broadly, across society as a whole. From 2003 through 2013 the number of Omani women employed in the public sector more than doubled, according to data from the National Centre for Statistics and Information (NCSI), while the number of women working in the private sector tripled over the same period. Similarly, as of mid-2015 females have held many top positions in business and government. For example, Oman’s ambassador to the US is HE Hunaina Sultan Al Ahmed Al Mughairy; HE Rawya Saud Al Busaidi serves as the Minister of Higher Education; and Aisha Al Kharusi is the chief marketing officer at Alizz Islamic Bank, to name just a couple of influential Omani women.
The establishment of Omani Women’s Day by HM Sultan Qaboos in 2009 is one example of several of the Sultanate’s reforms aimed at ensuring equal opportunities for women. Most recently, the government has been drawing up a new national strategy to empower women further. Though still in the development stages, this new programme promises to be a comprehensive blueprint aimed at ensuring that women are at the centre of the country’s long-term economic development.
History
Oman’s female population has enjoyed considerable freedom well before the establishment of the modern Sultanate in 1970. Traditional Omani society afforded women an important role in society, as maintainers of the family unit and, in many cases, local communities and regional social organisations. Since His Majesty Sultan Qaboos took power 45 years ago, the state has codified women’s rights in a wide variety of laws and rulings. For example, under article 2 of the Basic Law of the State, issued by Sultan Qaboos in 1996, women and men are named as equal. Part five of Oman’s Labour Law, introduced in 2003, confirms women’s eligibility to work, with article 80 stating “without prejudice to the provisions set out in this chapter, all provisions regulating the employment of workers shall be applicable to women workers without discrimination between them in the same work”. Other pieces of legislation that explicitly address the rights of women in Oman include the government land entitlement law, the social security law and the civil service law, among others.
A key early driving force for women’s rights in the country was the Omani Women’s Association (OWA), which was established as a non-governmental organisation (NGO) in 1971, making it one of the oldest NGOs in the sultanate. From its inception the OWA has benefitted from the support of the government, and today it functions as an arm of the Ministry of Social Development, though it is still managed on an independent basis. The OWA offers a variety of services and programmes aimed at empowering Omani women, including operating a network of rural women’s development centres and a number of training and education programmes. One overarching objective of these initiatives is to help women enter the workforce.
By the numbers
According to data from the NCSI, the number of women employed in the public sector – including in state-owned corporations, the civil service, Royal Court Affairs and the Diwan of the Royal Court – at the end of 2012 totalled around 68,200, as compared to just 29,218 at the end of 2003. Similarly, some 35,248 women were employed in private sector positions at the end of 2012, up from 13,385 in 2003. By the end of June 2015 this figure had jumped to 47,441, according to NCSI data. In 2008 around 510 women held senior public service jobs. By the end of 2012 this figure had grown to 774, at which point females occupied around 10 per cent of all senior public sector positions in Oman. These figures have increased further, according to local media reports.
These trends have played out across Oman’s education system as well. Some 32,434 Omani women were enrolled in private schools in the sultanate in the 2012/13 school year, up from 17,218 in 2008/09. Similarly, the number of females enrolled in higher education institutions jumped 20 per cent over roughly the same period, from 41,533 in 2007/08 to 51,048 in 2011/12.
Women in business
These changes have contributed to a wide variety of new opportunities for women. For example, the MBWC, which is affiliated with the Oman Chamber of Commerce and Industry (OCCI), aims to support and improve the situation of female business workers, with a particular focus on the small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) segment. The organisation serves as a support network, providing consultation and various services for working women. In addition to the MBWC, the OCCI oversees a number of committees and working groups aimed at enhancing the role of women. In late February 2015, for example, the chamber hosted a symposium on the topic of improving female economic empowerment, which was organised by the Arabian Women’s Media Company, a pan-Arab organisation aimed at focusing attention on regional social and economic issues relating to women. The meeting included speeches and presentations from women employed across a range of fields, including oil and gas, agriculture and fisheries, handicrafts, SMEs and media, in addition to training sessions on how local women can benefit from state and private support to launch businesses.
Encouraging female entrepreneurship is also a key area of focus at Oman’s National Business Centre (NBC), which was launched in 2012 by the Public Establishment for Industrial Estates (PEIE), a state-owned entity that aims to boost Oman’s position as a centre for technological and industrial innovation in the Gulf region. The NBC serves as an incubation centre for young Omani entrepreneurs at all stages of development, offering support services for new SMEs across a range of industries. The centre’s Najihat initiative, which is aimed specifically at supporting female entrepreneurs, has yielded various success stories in recent years. For example, Salma bint Noor Al Balushi took advantage of the incubator’s services to launch Azima Catering, which currently operates a number of cafes at Knowledge Oasis Muscat and at the Ministry of Higher Education.
Along with the steadily growing number of Omani women enrolled in local universities, these programmes suggest Oman may be entering a new stage of female involvement in business and society as a whole. According to a recent study carried out by Competence HR, a Muscat-based employment and job training company, Omani women are generally better candidates than men. In the study, which looked at 9000 recent Omani university graduates, women made up 65 per cent of the top candidates for employment across all fields. “[Women are] more committed, and particularly their English language skills are better than the men’s,” the report stated.
Challenges remaining
Nonetheless, women continue to face a variety of challenges when it comes to entering the workplace. According to a 2011 study by two female academics – Srilekha Goveas and Neelufer Aslam, both at Oman’s Waljat College of Applied Sciences – key obstacles to female employment in the sultanate include traditional societal mores, which tend to discourage women from working outside the home; a lack of professional women’s networks not only in Oman but throughout the GCC; and a widespread lack of formal human resources policies in both the public and private sectors, which tends to result in structural gender discrimination in many companies and institutions. In short, despite decades of progressive policies put in place by the government – particularly as compared to many other countries in the region – women continue to face a variety of hurdles when it comes to working in Oman.
Still, the government’s national strategy for Omani women, which has been in development since 2001, will likely aim to ensure that the sultanate’s female population will benefit from formal state support for years to come.