Women in consulting in the Gulf region

By Jodi Davies

Late last year we published a report which examined clients’ views about the role of women in consulting teams.  Our hypothesis was that clients value the breadth of thought that diverse teams bring.  And we were right: two thirds of clients, choosing between consulting teams which were equal in all other respects, would prefer to work with the team that has more women on it.  Why?  Because, they told us, they’ll get a better quality of deliverable.

But how does that play out in a part of the world where good people are in chronically short supply?  The consulting market in the Gulf Co-operation Council (Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman and Qatar) has enjoyed some of the highest growth rates in demand for consulting anywhere in the world.  Falls in the price of oil has brought the rate down in 2014, but it was still at the fairly dizzying level of 15%.  Part of the reason behind that growth has been a shortage of experienced and well-qualified people in GCC organisations – consultants have been able to help close the gap while progress is made in raising the skills of local people.  But there’s also a lot to do in this part of the world, so consultants are playing an important role in maintaining the momentum of change.

It would be tempting to conclude that, in the scramble for good people, most consulting firms aren’t fussy about their gender – but that’s not the case.  When we carried out a not-very-scientific survey of consulting firms in the region, every firm we spoke to said that recruiting more women is a priority for them.  Indeed, one said that 40% of its graduate intake is now female, another that half of all new hires in the last quarter have been women.  It would be nice to attribute these efforts entirely to a belief in fairness and equality, but the strategy makes economic sense as well.

In Qatar, twice as many women as men are enrolled in university, and 60% of graduates are women.  Research by UNESCO suggests that the share of women graduates in the sciences is actually higher in the Middle East than it is in Western Europe.  Dubai’s HH Sheikh Mohammed aims to force women to be 50% of the members of all public boards in the country. But increasing education and government initiatives haven’t yet translated into more equal levels of participation in the workforce in the Gulf region: the World Bank estimates that men outnumber women in the workforce by two to one in the UAE and by four to one in Saudi Arabia.

With culture being the biggest obstacle to increasing women’s participation in the workforce (a point made in recent research by Strategy&), which itself will go some way towards solving the overall shortfall in talent, consulting firms are well placed to play an important role in the social, as well as economic, development of the Gulf states.