Breaking the Single-Digit Ceiling: Women in the Gulf C-Suite

A few months ago, I sat across from a Saudi executive who had just been named the first woman on her company's leadership committee. She should have been celebrating. Instead, she asked me a version of a question I hear often in this region: "Now that I'm in the room, how do I make sure I'm not just decoration?"

That question is exactly why this work matters to me, and why so much of my coaching practice is built around it. If you're navigating something similar, I'd encourage you to explore her coaching programmes for women leaders and see how the work is structured. For now, let's look at what's actually happening across the region, because the picture is more nuanced than either the optimistic or the discouraging headlines suggest.

The Numbers Are Real, and They're Still Small

Let's start with what the data says.

The GCC Board Gender Index 2026, produced by Heriot-Watt University Dubai and Aurora50, found that women now hold 7 percent of board seats across publicly listed companies in the Gulf. That is genuine progress from previous years, but it is still a single-digit figure across the region as a whole. The UAE leads at 15 percent of board seats, its highest share on record and up from just 3.5 percent in 2020. Bahrain follows at 10.5 percent. Oman, Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia all sit at 7 percent or below, with Saudi Arabia at the lower end of the range at 2.9 percent.

At the same time, female labour force participation has climbed sharply in several markets. Saudi Arabia's participation rate more than doubled between 2017 and 2023, and government figures put it above 36 percent in early 2025. Women now make up more than two-fifths of STEM graduates across every GCC economy.

Put those two data points together and you get the real story. Women are entering the workforce and completing advanced qualifications at a pace the region hasn't seen before, but that pipeline has not yet translated into proportional representation at the top. The bottleneck isn't entry-level talent. It's the climb through middle and senior management into the rooms where strategy actually gets decided.

Why the Gap Persists Even as Policy Moves Forward

I've coached women at nearly every stage of this climb, and the barrier rarely looks like outright exclusion. It looks quieter than that.

It looks like being the only woman in a strategy meeting and noticing that your points get restated by a male colleague before they're taken seriously. It looks like being offered visibility roles, the panel appearance, the diversity committee seat, while the harder, more consequential assignments go to someone else by default. It looks like having real ambition and genuinely supportive leadership above you, but no one in your corner actively advocating for your name when a promotion decision gets made in a room you're not in.

That last point matters more than people realise. Sponsorship, someone senior spending their own credibility to open a door for you, tends to move careers faster than mentorship alone, particularly in organisational cultures across the Gulf where advancement is still heavily relationship-driven. A mentor will tell you what they think. A sponsor will put your name forward when you're not there to advocate for yourself.

What I See Working

The women I've coached who have broken into senior leadership here tend to do a few things with real intention, not by accident.

They build sponsors deliberately, rather than waiting to be noticed. They ask directly, sometimes for the first time in their career, for someone senior to advocate for them by name. They get honest, structured feedback on how they're actually perceived, not just how they intend to come across, often through tools like 360 assessments or the EQ and personality instruments I use in coaching. And they stop trying to lead by mimicking the leadership style modelled around them. The executives who make the strongest impression in Gulf boardrooms are rarely the ones performing a borrowed version of authority. They're the ones who have done the work to know exactly who they are as leaders and bring that into the room without apology.

None of this is about softening ambition to make it more palatable. It's about being precise: knowing which relationships, which visibility, and which evidence of impact actually move you toward the next room, rather than spreading effort across everything at once.

The Room Is Opening. Walking In Differently Is the Work.

The policy landscape across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and the wider Gulf has shifted in ways that would have seemed unlikely a decade ago. Vision 2030, the UAE's Gender Balance Council, and similar national frameworks have created real structural openings. That part of the work isn't mine to take credit for, and it's genuinely significant.

What coaching addresses is what happens once a woman is standing in that open door: how she leads once she's there, how she builds the influence and sponsorship that keep the door open behind her, and how she defines success on terms that are actually hers rather than terms she inherited.

If you're a woman leading, or preparing to lead, at senior levels anywhere across the Gulf, that's the work I'd be glad to do with you.