There is no question that having women in leadership positions boosts economic outputs. One 2014 study on women on boards from the Academy of Management found that “female board representation is positively related to accounting returns and that this relationship is more positive in countries with stronger shareholder protections.” Female leaders have also been shown to be more willing to make radical changes with minimized risk. The openness of female leaders to outside-the-box thinking might arise from the experience of operating inside a “box” that wasn’t built for them. Yet, corporations and institutions around the world still lag in capitalizing on this opportunity for growth.

Out of 146 countries in the 2024 Global Gender Gap report from the World Economic Forum (WEF), Lebanon ranked 133 overall and 111 on indicators of women’s economic participation, a number that reflects Lebanon’s “brain drain” phenomenon, wherein young professionals look for success outside the country. A 2016 Oxfam-commissioned AUB study on women in leadership in Lebanon, Jordan and the Kurdistan region of Iraq was conducted over seven months with 24 stakeholders from different regions in Lebanon. It found that “women linked the difficulty of having a leadership role in Lebanon to the dual roles of women (i.e. working within the home as well as in the public sphere), and the lack of community/familial support in a patriarchal society,” whereas men cited perceptions of women’s emotional nature as an inhibitor to leadership capabilities. This dual role in domestic and public work hints at the intersection between care work and leadership, which one might argue are two sides of the same coin: if women are to lead in the public sphere, more men must lead in the domestic sphere. However, despite the grim findings of selective reports, the extensive cataclysms that the country has endured in the past five years have thrown much into question, including assumptions that Lebanon must look outside itself for solutions to social woes. Here, three change-making leaders share their experiences and aspirations.

In Lebanon, the country’s multiple crises and upheavals might actually be helping to shift long-held norms. Deenah Fakhoury is the Executive Director of UN Global Compact Network, an organization with a mandate that, as she explains it, “works closely with the corporate sector to align them on best practices, on human rights, labor rights, environment and anti-corruption, and achieving SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals).” She explains that in the Lebanese context, they also work with the civil society sector, which has sometimes taken on the work of the public sector. Fakhoury says that although traditional gender norms prevail in Lebanon, “the fact that we have a financial crisis has led women to work, not because their husbands would like to see them work or their fathers, but because it is a financial need.” It is hard to find exact counts on how many women joined or left the labor force as a result of the financial crisis or the COVID-19 pandemic, though Lebanon’s ranking for women’s economic participation in the WEF’s 2018 Global Gender Gap report was 136 out of 149 countries. It has since moved up 25 places.

Caroline Fattal, chairperson of Fattal Group, a family-owned distribution company operating in MENA and France approaching its 130^th anniversary, says that Lebanon is still in a transition phase, but that “wars, disability and crises” are changing the landscape. In families where the men “used to be the sole breadwinner and had that burden on them,” economic and social disruptions are, in some cases, pushing more women into taking on this role.

In rooms full of men

Both Fakhoury and Fattal have run into hurdles of their own. Fakhoury recalls hearing one of her bosses argue that she “doesn’t need the money as much as ‘Habib’ because ‘Habib’ is a man who has a family to provide for.“ Fakhoury adds, “I’m sure they don’t mean any harm, but it’s in so many minds that because you’re a woman, you don’t need financial independence. Someone will take care of you.” Fakhoury sees this mindset in the corporations she works with whenever she lays the issue of gender equality, the fifth SDG, on the table. Global Compact Network has a workshop for corporations called SDG Day, undertaken for the entire company from janitors and drivers to CEOs. SDG 5 is always the issue she saves for last, because, as she explains, “when we reach gender equality there is a big turmoil of discussions, and everything becomes disrupted.” This particular issue, she adds, is one that always stirs conflict amongst employees themselves, and not with the workshop trainers. But, she says, “we always reach a consensus” wherein the final resolution comes down to a question of “do you want others to be treated the same way you are treated? The moment you make [the issues] relevant to everyone as people, every time in every single company,” there is intense argumentation, but also an arrival at a final sense of accord.

The struggle to occupy a space that has long been dominated by men is something that Fattal says must be learned over time. Fattal, who received her first Forbes mention (of many) in 2014 when she was listed as one of the top 100 most powerful women in business in the Arab world, says that the recognition came as a surprise. When she first became a young board member of Fattal Group, Fattal recalls feelings of intimidation. “When I started and had to go to board meetings I was young, I was the only woman, I was surrounded by lawyers, the external auditors, much older people. And I felt sometimes sick, physically sick.” The problem for many women is not a capability gap, but a confidence gap. According to Fattal, “we need to normalize this for other women. Finding your voice and being confident to speak what you think and not listening to the voices in your head” is something that takes time.

Hasmig Dantziguian Khoury, a Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) strategist who developed and led CSR at Bank Audi until the end of 2024, says that “if you’re in a boardroom, as a woman you will be more overlooked or undermined than a man would be. Women have to continuously prove themselves whereas men don’t.” To back up this claim, she cites a 2022 cross-industry study on gender bias quoted by Harvard Business Review that looked at workplace environments in four industries that had higher ratios of female to male employees. Even in these spaces, women were frequently interrupted by men, had to downplay their accomplishments, take care not to communicate with too much authority, and would sometimes be held accountable for problems outside their control. Discussing similar workplace biases, Fakhoury says that women have tools to respond to these types of situations that they’ve had to develop throughout their lives. “You navigate, you have that emotional intelligence to navigate around people and help them accept things that they usually wouldn’t…there’s a way to negotiate things that, in some instances, is very natural. It’s a survival mode sometimes.”

The domino effect of mentorship

For each of these women, mentorship has been impactful in supporting them in their roles and it is something they, in turn, offer to others. Fakhoury has been part of the Blessing Foundation, a women’s empowerment organization in Lebanon “where a woman leader mentors a girl at the beginning of her career.” Fakhoury posits that “the more mentors you have that can actually support other women, the more you will balance this gender gap.” Dantziguian Khoury is motivated by a personal mission to support other women however she can and to care for the environment, two issues which can be characterized by “a push and pull of cultural momentum.” In 2018 and 2019, she helped organize an event called Mind the Gap, which had thousands of attendees including the president at the time and numerous parliamentarians. The organizers made the strategic decision to invite only female speakers onto the stage in this event on closing the skill gap in the Lebanese labor force in an effort to reverse the norms.

Fattal, who in the beginning of her career would come across many articles about highly competitive behavior amongst women in leadership, a phenomenon derogatively dubbed Queen Bee syndrome, now sees an emphasis on and greater push for women supporting women. For her part, she ensured that 50 percent of the board members of Fattal Group are female, a change that the whole corporation supported. She also founded Stand for Women, an NGO that works with partners to provide training, tools, and microloans for female entrepreneurs and that purposefully emphasizes sisterhood. In Akkar, they began working with 40 women to give trainings on sewing and making mouneh, and then provided sewing machines and food processors. Following the Beirut port explosion, Stand for Women supported 300 women in returning to business, from flower shop workers and seamstresses to jewelry makers and restaurant owners. They are currently pairing embroidery workshops in Zahleh with trainings on gender-based violence.

Local initiatives such as Stand for Women arguably have greater impact than one-time trainings or limited projects sponsored by foreign funding. Fattal expressed the importance of keeping in consistent contact with each of the female-led enterprises from the initiation of the projects until the present. In this way, the women continue to receive support, mentorship, trainings, and a system of positive accountability.  “We are a small NGO but when we start with people, we follow with them. We don’t just give them the trainings and leave.” She adds that, “It’s not about changing the world. If I impact 50 women, I have achieved something.” Of course, Stand for Women has impacted far more women throughout the years.

The invisible elephant in the room

Cultural biases are not the only obstacles faced by women in leadership.  “Invisible labor,” a term coined in 1986 by sociologist Arlene Kaplan Daniels, is work that occurs both domestically and in the workplace, is undertaken predominantly by women and as such, goes un(der)paid and undervalued. In the workplace, this kind of labor might include event-planning, operational work, facilitation of positive relational dynamics, and minutes-taking. As an example, Fattal says that “when there’s a meeting and we have to order coffee, there’s a woman who presents herself to do that role and it’s expected that she’s the one to do this regardless of her seniority.”

But the other piece is, of course, that in order for women to excel in demanding roles, someone else needs to step in at home. A 2022 report by the UN Economic and Social Council for Women in Asia (ESCWA) found that 94 percent of unpaid childcare in Lebanon is undertaken by women. Oxfam’s 2020 report titled “Time to Care,” estimated that “the monetary value of women’s unpaid care work globally for women aged 15 and over is at least $10.8 trillion annually – three times the size of the world’s tech industry.” The same report found that women in rural communities and low-income countries “can spend up to 14 hours a day on unpaid care work, which is five times more than men spend in those same communities.”

When care work is invisible and unvalued, it often becomes exploitative. In Lebanon, gender equity at work does not always translate to greater gender equity at home. Instead, care work often falls on women working a second shift after arriving home, or is outsourced to female migrant domestic workers. Migrant domestic workers in Lebanon operate under an exploitative ‘kefala system’ and are excluded from Lebanese labor laws. These women can be subject to low wages, human trafficking, uncapped work hours, and can have their passports withheld and experience limited freedom of movement according to a 2021 report on domestic migrant workers in Lebanon by the International Organization for Migration.

Fakhoury believes that negotiations around greater parity cannot exclude anyone, and that the most convincing arguments come from asking people to put themselves in the shoes of others. “Lack of inclusivity is somehow a fear to lose your own status,” but change is possible when people are exposed to alternative options. When she works with corporations on SDG 5, for example, she always brings up men’s right to paternity leave, which, if enacted alongside a better maternity leave policy, might go far in helping men recognize the magnitude of domestic labor and take on a larger caregiving role. It can be argued that women make good leaders precisely because they have had lifelong opportunities to learn care work. If men want to become better leaders who do not shrug off care work in scenarios that lead to exploitation and vulnerability of women, they have much to learn by starting at home.

It begins with how boys and girls are raised, which Dantziguian Khoury believes is changing in “the next generation, Gen Z.”  For her part, she says “I have two young men who I’ve raised to do everything: cook, clean, do their own laundry,” adding that they would be willing to support a wife’s career by taking on more domestic labor themselves. Eve Rodsky’s book Fair Play, on renegotiating domestic labor, discusses how men can benefit from managing the conception, planning, and execution of household tasks that almost exclusively fall on women. For a task like children’s activities, for example, this would include researching the activity based on the child’s interests, signing the child up, communicating with instructors, and transportation. Fattal says that change “can only come with dialogue, and you see unfortunately in many parts of the world that we are going backwards and that would be a real pity.”

A matriarchy of care?

Progress towards greater gender equality might have its own flavor in Lebanese culture, which is sustained in large part by a sturdy familial structure and ethos of social interdependence. This structure has largely been built and led by women who, in the Arab context historically and currently, exhibit tremendous power, authority, and ownership over the sphere of family life, which extends out to spheres of education and networks of social support. An otherwise outdated and rather sexist 1977 comment piece by Reverend Kamal Farah on the Arab family made one observation which is still applicable in many ways, that “the Arab family is both patriarchal and matriarchal, at the same time. Although sociologists generally classify families as either dominated by father or mother, the Arab family has the peculiar distinction of fitting into both categories.”

Author Angela Garbes argues that the individualistic approach to family and society has been damaging for western cultures. In many ways, the lost cultural structure that she describes is one that is still robust in Lebanon. In Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change, she writes, “The simple fact is that for centuries, throughout the world, we lived communally. Having individual families siloed off from one another … is a relatively recent social structure that we accept … A lack of shared responsibility and interconnectedness makes it difficult to find solutions for needs more easily addressed in community, such as childcare, meal preparation, and household maintenance. It leads to isolation and an every-family-for-themselves mentality. It leaves parents feeling common domestic strains as personal problems rather than structural ones.” But she seems to be arriving at a truth that is already woven through Arab culture when she observes that care work, “that energy and effort to maintain—ourselves, our loved ones, our community—has always felt substantial, true, visceral.” In reference to how care work becomes viewed as overly burdensome when it is undervalued or invisible in patriarchal systems, she comments, “I don’t believe care work has to wreck us. This labor can be shared, social, collective—and transformative.”

The work of negotiating for greater structural equity that allows for more women in leadership does not hinge on removing the familial and social power that women have, but instead in broadening the work of caregiving and invisible labor, ensuring that it does not go unvalued, that women do not shoulder it alone or disproportionately, and that they are protected by a supportive legal apparatus. The future of both ‘professional’ and domestic work need not adhere to patriarchal norms that value one and undermine the other. Rather, a matriarchal system that centers human wellbeing over profit is an alternative that already has its roots in Arab culture, and that, one must add, has enormous economic potential.