Dubai

Even though women in the Gulf countries are being sidelined because Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sector has always been male-dominated, it is vice versa in the UAE.

According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index (which is based on equality in economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, political empowerment and health), the UAE does best among Arab countries. But in 109th position out of 136 nations, there is still a long way to go.

“Women have reversed a gender gap in the academic world, and are now broadly outperforming men. Progress has been made in the professional front but women still make up less than half the UAE’s workforce,” said Omar Mohammad Al Mahmoud, Acting CEO of UAE ICT Fund, which is designed to fuel innovative research and development projects within the UAE ICT sector and support education and training in the field.

“We are seeing a female-dominated ICT sector in the upcoming society. Now we have more Emirati female engineering students than male in the UAE,” he said.

ICT Fund has been looking to “increase female participation within the ICT sector” and believes it is crucial to achieve sustainability, creativity and innovation in the country.

Al Mahmoud said that ICT Fund has fully funded Dr Shayma Al Kobaisi’s project in developing a ‘Health Monitoring System’. This project will support general public health by developing a health care management system that reduces cost, effort and time spent in traditional visits to hospitals, while providing intelligent information that might be useful for improving public health care strategies. The proposed system will collect and analyse patients and environmental data in order to derive conclusions that will help in providing better insight into causes of environmentally triggered diseases such as Asthma.

Another funded project is ‘Sultan Island’ that was led by two Emirati women.

The educational project, which employs the concept of entertaining electronic games in the field of education, has contributed to the dissemination and promotion of the Arab culture, values and traditions to benefit the UAE and Arab countries.

Al Mahmoud said that the involvement of Emirati Women in the UAE ICT sector is a critical enabler for the country’s burgeoning knowledge economy. The ICT sector is in need to address gender sensitivity assessments in the UAE and the status of women within it.

Female students recognise that more opportunities are opening up to study and work in IT sector.

“UAE is the first country in the Arab world to enforce quotas for women on company boards,” said Raja Abdul Rahman, a networking student at Higher College of Technology (HCT).

Raja is part of the four-member UAE female team and one of the five teams selected internationally by a SAP competition to present their app — Green Home — in the US for further development.

She said the app helps consumers to monitor their current consumption automatically even when outside the country. They [consumers] can know which switches are on and off and can be turned off using the app.

Policymakers are keen to empower women in the IT sector and “I see this (IT) career as a way to give back to the country by contributing to the development of the country,” she said.

Fatima Jaffar Baqer, an application development student at HCT and a team member of Green Home app, said that both male and female are working in the IT sector.

Fatima has won the mobile application interface design award for a TRA app — Wojhti.

“I see huge opportunities in the IT sector despite challenges as the industry is growing at a robust pace. I like developing apps and I develop apps every year. I have developed three interfaces for the Dubai Volunteering Centre app,” Fatima said.

From an educational front, ICT Fund is working to empower Emirati women in the UAE ICT sector through awarding scholarships and strengthening the technological education of Emiratis. ICT Fund has recently revealed, as part of its 2014 budget, that it will grant about 204 scholarships in UAE University, Abu Dhabi Polytechnic University, Khalifa University and Dubai University this year.

“We have around 300 engineering students sponsored by the Fund,” Al Mahmoud said.