CAIRO: Have women in business managed to accomplish what their counterparts in politics were not able to achieve? former Member of Parliament, Mona Makram Ebeid, posed this question during a debate at the American University in Cairo on Wednesday. Ebeid started the debate by highlighting the global growth in the number of women in the business field, making businesswomen one of the global economic forces that policymakers can t afford to ignore. Ebeid attributed the impressive growth in the number of women doing business in Egypt, especially in small and medium-sized enterprises, to the slight improvement in training and education of women, which shows that women, when given the opportunity, can prove themselves and excel in their fields. Despite this improvement, many of women s small and medium-sized businesses closed down, only a short while after their inception, due to lack of access to knowledge, technical assistance and financial credit, she said. Education is supposed to tackle these issues, nonetheless it is completely absent from the National Democratic Party s upcoming conference agenda. In politics, the situation is even worse, as the number of women decision makers in the cabinet and parliament is only 11 out of 454, Ebeid said. According to research, there is still considerable resistance to hiring women in managerial positions among men, even though Egyptian law prohibits any sort of discrimination. Hala El Said, who has been in charge of upgrading the capacity of the Central Bank of Egypt and the financial sector at large since January 2003 in her capacity as executive director of the Egyptian Banking Institute, believes that Egypt is still lagging behind in terms of empowering women to enter the business field. Internationally, women workers comprise nearly half of the labor force, compared to 28 percent in Arab countries, even though women account for 49 percent of the Arab population, said El Said. This exclusion of women ultimately leads to a reduction in the potential welfare of the family, and dependence on only one person, she added. The number of women occupying top level positions in different fields in Egypt has increased from 7 percent in 1998 to 25 percent in 2006, she said. Statistics show that women have more opportunities in the fields of education, media and banking, while the fields with the lowest number of women in top-level positions were agriculture, transport, communications, aviation and public service. Today, many women occupy the positions of CEO of Egyptian banks and chairperson in several financial institutions. There are two women on the boards of the top 30 companies listed in the Cairo and Alexandria Stock Exchange, she observed. El Said listed many challenges that women face when trying to get into the business field in developing countries. They include the informal referral system which still persists among men, the negative effect of accumulated values and cultural assumptions about women s roles, and the fear among CEOs that women will bring a women s agenda as opposed to a general agenda of increasing shareholder value and company profit margins. Investment in education is the key to empowering women, El Said added. Women have to be informed about legal and commercial issues, marketing possibilities and information and communication technologies. She also called for increasing women quotas in chambers of commerce, unions, municipalities and parliament. In Norway, for instance, companies will be forced to close down if their boards do not have a representation of 40 percent women by the end of 2007, she said. We don t have empirical data to support whether women are more successful in politics or economics, said Loula Zaklama, president and managing director at Rada Research and Public Relations Company. While women entrepreneurs comprise 44 percent of the total number of entrepreneurs in the US, 30 percent in the EU and 20 percent in China, in the Arab countries women comprise only 12 percent of the total number of entrepreneurs, Zaklama said. Zaklama believes that one of the main reasons behind Egypt's higher rankings in the World Bank s Ease of Doing Business report was the increase in the percentage of women among employees and entrepreneurs. Women in politics aren t doing any better either, Zaklama noted, while a country like Rwanda came out as the top country in the global ranking of women in national parliaments, with women filling 48.8 percent of its parliamentary seats, Egypt was at the bottom of the rankings, with 2 percent of parliamentary seats occupied by women. I believe that women can be more successful in business than politics because the latter is not a clean business, and it s about who you know, not what you know. Unlike in business, mistakes in politics are fatal and the success factors are not under your control that much, she said.
