First ever expert woman list launched by AUS faculty

The Expert Woman List, the first of its kind in the Middle East, is part of the new Women and Leadership website launched by faculty members at American University of Sharjah (AUS). The web portal is a research-backed initiative of professional women residing in the Arab Gulf countries and provides multimedia resources for academics, practitioners and students interested in the topic of leadership in the Middle East.

The Expert Woman List is a media database of female experts and leaders in the UAE and provides an online directory and source for broadcasters, journalists, conference organizers and event managers to find the right female voice and presence for any news feature, documentary, conference platform or forum that requires a viewpoint on a range of issues and topics from economics, business, sciences, government, IT and more.

The project is led by Dr. Linzi Kemp, Associate Professor of Management, who earlier discovered a gap between the abundance of women in university and the absence of women in business in the GCC. Realizing that the higher the corporate ladder went, the lower the number of women present, Dr. Kemp, joined by colleagues Dr. Norita Ahmad, Associate Professor of MIS, and Linda McLoughlin, Senior Lecturer of Marketing and Placement Director, began a search for the female leaders in the Gulf.

"To answer the question of whether we can apply leadership theory to support professional women up the ranks, the foundation was laid out for the first intensive and extensive study into the lives of professional women in the Middle East, with hopes to uncover the mystery behind the gender gap, and to inspire more young women to persevere against the barriers in pursuit of their dreams," said Dr. Kemp.

According to the website, the Women in Leadership portal aims to build a platform for women in the Gulf to share their stories of ambition and accomplishment through a series of face-to-face interviews. Their lives reveal recurrent themes that invite further exploration of the relationship between a woman's culture and her professional occupation in the private and public sectors in the Middle East region. The portal contains individual case studies chronicling the achievements of women across the Gulf, a first-of-its-kind living archive.

The work is supported by a Faculty Research Grant from AUS.

The website can be accessed at www.wil.insightsme.net/.