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Emirati women should strike a balance as professionals

Despite progressive policies of the UAE government, almost 80 per cent do not work

It was Karl Marx who famously observed that industrialisation in the West created misery but at the same time furnished unprecedented opportunity for liberation from the shackles of the past. Capitalism takes away with one hand and gives with the other. Industrial capitalism in Britain, for example, smashed the extended families and thus took away women's central role in maintaining the cohesion and continuity of those extended family networks that held society together. But then it furnished education and rights by way of compensation. In many ways the struggle of women in the West can be seen as a struggle to get from the old dispossession to these new entitlements.
By contrast, the people of the east coast of the Arabian Peninsula have, over the last 60 years or so, successfully leap-frogged the smoke stacks of industrialisation and navigated a remarkable transition from pre-industrial to post-industrial societies. Emirati women were not historically dispossessed by industrialisation in the same way as women in the West. And the difference is dramatic.
Consider the following scenario. Traditional communities destroyed, hundreds of thousands of extended families torn apart and scattered across the country, and beyond, by brutal impersonal forces. This is not a description of contemporary Syria or Iraq, but of the process of industrialisation in Britain. It was a process that famously inspired J.R.R. Tolkein's creation of the monstrously destructive Sauron, in Lord of the Rings, pitted against the pre-industrial idyll of "the Shire".
In Britain, the role of women in maintaining the fabric of that pre-industrial social cohesion - the maintenance of extended families, the transmission of social values - had been central, despite all kinds of subjugation. But the machine bureaucracies of industrialisation went on to impose new humiliations. The bureaucracies - the Office of this, the Department of that, the Ministry of the other - sequestered the job of social cohesion in this new-alienated world. Women, their competitor, needed to be downgraded in new ways.
You can see this in the evolution of the language. In pre-industrial Britain, the word "gossip" denoted a kind of family networking co-ordinated by a trusted person - usually female - at key social gatherings. But look at the use of the word since the 1800s and it has become trivialised as "small talk", or idle chat, among women exclusively. It was feminist psychology that led the way in this kind of close analysis of discourse, acknowledging the subtle ways in which this process of dispossession has occurred.
It's only when we appreciate the social cohesion that has not been lost here - the dispossession that has not happened - that we might appreciate better the dilemmas facing many Emirati women today; caught between a known traditional social status, and an unknown status in an uncertain job market. The fact that about 80 per cent of local women are not in paid employment should be appreciated from this perspective, among others.
The UAE government has made startling progress in extending formal rights and entitlements to encourage women into the workplace. But there is a level beyond law and policy that women must also face once they get to work.
There is a celebrated episode of Friends in which Rachel finds herself excluded from key decisions in her workplace simply because she is a non-smoker; the smokers continue discussions on the office roof while Rachel can only kick her heels inside. In this fictitious case, gender was not the issue, but substitute for smoking and the collective activities typically engaged in by men. These are activities outside the workplace but in which they may continue work-related discussions. Here you can see the basis for a persistent gender-bias in the workplace, even if no one intends it. This is what psychologist Sherrie Bourg Carter described as "Second Generation Gender Bias".
So there are Twin Towers guarding the gates of women's emancipation in the workplace here: traditional social cohesion and post-modern gender bias. Neither should be underestimated, let alone ignored.
Greg Fantham, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Heriot-Watt University Dubai Campus