Education has been the key to delivering Arab women from a status of near illiteracy to positions of power in less than 50 years.
That was the message in a lecture given in Dundee last night by Dr Fatima Al-Sayegh, a leading academic from UAE University.
The lecture was organised jointly by Dundee’s Social Work Department and the Al-Maktoum Institute and was given to an invited audience including Dundee Council leader, Councillor Jill Shimi and other city councillors, staff from the Social Work and Leisure and Communities departments and a group of female students from the Gulf States who are attending a summer school being held at the Institute.
Dr Al-Sayegh said the key role being taken by young women from the United Arab Emirates of today in the development of the Gulf States is a far cry from the experiences of their grandmothers.
As recently as the 1960s the illiteracy rate among females was as high as 99 per cent. All that changed after the Emirates gained independence in 1971 when women were given special attention and began to be encouraged to gain an education and to take up positions in public life. In the 1970s schools were opened for girls, access to higher education became available culminating in the opening of the campus at UAE University, College of Higher Technology.
The latest addition was the all-female Zayed University, which opened in 1998. Dr Al-Sayegh said that through education and changing social attitudes female participation in the workforce had grown from 3.4 per cent in 1980 to over 40 per cent last year.
The four main elements leading towards the increasing role for Emirati women were access to education, changes in attitude towards women in the workplace, emancipation in political decision-making and the impact of the Arab feminist movement on Emirati women.
She said the 39 young women currently attending the summer school in Dundee, and those who had participated in the previous three summer schools, were now regarded as potential leaders in their society and were being given opportunities denied to previous generations of Emirati women.
Lessons had been learned from other countries including Scotland where she praised the female representation in the Scottish Parliament. In the UAE women were now becoming more involved in politics and there were now two female Ministers in the Government. Women would also feature for the first time in their new National Assembly due to be elected later this year.
Dr Al-Sayegh said, “Education has been the key to the emancipation of women in the Emirates. In all walks of life, the professions, politics, commerce and industry more and more women are being promoted to positions of real influence.” Earlier the students from the Gulf had spent the day hearing about the work of Dundee’s Social Work department. This included visits to several of the centres used for looking after the disabled, the elderly, children and women affected by domestic violence.
In January this year the Social Work department and the Al-Maktoum Institute signed a Memorandum of Understanding aimed at promoting multiculturalism and providing social work staff with information and materials about the customs and beliefs associated with Islam and Muslims.
