Women Leaders in the GCC States:
Gender and Leadership in Global Perspective

This project focused on how leadership is conceptualized, accessed, and exercised, especially by women, across diverse political and cultural regions with an emphasis on the GCC states. The Gulf states are a highly relevant region for interdisciplinary area studies and social science research, as the states’ multi-dimensional engagements with women’s leadership and empowerment challenge many key social science perspectives on the topic, whether concerning the “oil curse” theory, feminist political economy, or religious-cultural-centered analyses.

This research spurred multi-disciplinary collaborations with NYUAD colleagues Laila Prager (Anthropology) and Rahma Abdulkadir (Political Science) and Christin Camia (Psychology) at Zayed University Abu Dhabi. Single- and co-authored research articles and book chapters from this project include “Between Leadership and Kinship: Women Empowerment in the GCC Countries” in Corruption and Informal Practices in the Middle East, I. Kubbe and A. Varraich (eds.), 2019, London: Routledge, 188-206; “The Politics of Women Empowerment. Female Leaders in the UAE” HAWWA: Journal of Women of the Middle East and the Islamic World, 2020, 18(1): 8-30; “Leaders around the World: New Horizons for the Comparative Study of Political Leadership,” in RoutledgeHandbook ofInternational Leadership Research, Y. Tolstikov-Mast et al. (eds.), 2021, London: Routledge, 86-97; and, “Between Uniformity and Polarization: Women’s Empowerment in the Public Press of GCC States” Politics & Gender, 2023, 19(1): 166-194 (impact factor: 3.165 in 2021).