As companies around the world face pressure to increase gender diversity, the United Arab Emirates, home to the Dubai and Abu Dhabi stock markets, will need at least one female director on the boards of all listed companies.
The Securities and Commodities Authority said in a statement that the move is aimed at empowering Emirati women and enabling them to play a larger role on the boards of publicly-traded companies.
The five largest companies listed on the Dubai Financial Market PJSC and the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange have 84 board members, according to data on the exchange websites, with only three of them being women.
The National newspaper quoted the regulator’s Chief Executive Officer Obaid Saif Al Zaabi as saying, “We used to accept excuses if there wasn’t compliance, but now we’re going to make female representation mandatory.” “At least one female member of the board of directors of any publicly-traded company is now mandated.”
The UAE’s central bank has already signed the partnership with Aurora50, a company that focuses on gender-balanced boardrooms, to increase the number of women on the boards of both public and private companies in the country.
The area has “come a long way in the last decade,” according to Racha Alkhawaja, Equitativa Group’s Dubai-based group chief distribution and development officer, and the decision to put at least one woman on the boards of publicly-traded companies “falls under the whole issue of quotas.”
Women are represented on the boards of 28 of the 110 publicly traded companies in the UAE, but they only account for 3.5 % of all board positions, according to Aurora50 data.
“At this early stage, quotas could be necessary to ensure that companies go above and beyond in their efforts to find such women,” Alkhawaja said. “There are so many unnoticed women. They’re there, they’re doing a fantastic job, they’re senior, they’re well-known, but they’re still invisible.”
Women held 17 % of board positions in India, according to Aurora50, where a law passed in 2013 requires companies to have at least one female board member. According to the data gathered by the BoardEx, France had the largest number of women on boards in 2020, with 43.6 %.
In the UAE, the regulator has not yet made it mandatory for publicly traded corporations to disclose equality and social governance indicators, although it has recently encouraged them to do so.
