Word: gulf
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Middle East Economic Digest estimates that Gulf women control around $246 billion, projected to hit $385 billion by 2011. In Saudi Arabia, women own about a third of brokerage accounts and 40% of family-run firms, albeit often as silent partners. A 2007 study by the International Finance Corporation, an arm of the World Bank, found that a third of women-owned enterprises in the United Arab Emirates generated over $100,000 a year, versus only 13% of American women-owned firms. Yet few Arab businesswomen could raise capital from banks, usually turning to friends and family instead...
High-profile women investment bankers like Nahed Taher, head of Gulf One Investment Bank, and Global Investment House's Maha al-Ghunaim, provide inspiration. Eid estimates that when she attended the American University of Beirut in the mid-1980s, about 15% of finance students were female; when she returned to teach in 2000, she says, over half were women. Others simply school themselves. When Khalida Mirza started selling marble, she had a high school education and four kids, but she quickly taught herself business basics through books and magazines. Today, she has a property firm and gives women jargon-free...
...Arab woman investor has a long history. The Prophet Muhammad met his first wife, a wealthy Meccan trader, when she hired him to take caravans to Syria. When the Gulf's economy relied on pearls and fish, not gas and oil, absent men often left women in charge of their business affairs. Today, many Gulf women have lots of liquid assets, partly because of Muslim inheritance law. Shari'a dictates that a married woman's wealth is her own; spending on her household is her husband's responsibility...
...laws on gender segregation mean the obstacles are greater there, too. One wealth manager recalls sitting in a Saudi palace giving an investment seminar, all the while worrying about whether he'd be arrested by the mutawwa, or religious police, for being alone in a room with 40 women. Gulf conservatives may rail against women driving, showing their hair or voting, but opposition to women investors has been muted. "You don't see [extremists] worrying about women investing," says Rola Dashti, the first woman elected as chair of the Kuwait Economic Society...
Still, there's no question that becoming financially sophisticated brings a new level of independence. Bridge Partners, which includes Gulf royals and business billionaires among its clients, began focusing on managing money for women two years ago when a Saudi princess asked the firm to organize some investment workshops. Managing director Bell says he found "a lot of anger and frustration" among the workshop participants. "They'd say, 'I inherited this money from my dad, and it's just sitting there. We're not given the ability to make proper investments, to control our own money...