HeForShe: My Personal Commitment to Gender Equality

As business leaders, my leadership team and I are making decisions based on three considerations:

1. Our vision for the business
2. The performance of DP World, in other words, whether the data show us that we are doing well, and finally
3. Our values.

I would argue that our values have to be the most important benchmark when it comes to making business decisions.

And for me personally, one absolute core value is a strong belief in equality and equity – and gender equality is a key part of that.

That’s why I feel so honoured and humbled that on behalf of UN Women, Anita Bhatia - Assistant Secretary-General and Deputy Executive Director - named me as one of its HeForShe champions on International Women’s Day, 8 March 2022.

As has been noted elsewhere, I am the first person in the MENA region – across the Middle East and Northern Africa – to receive this honour.

This fact alone tells us one thing: a lot still needs to be done to advance the cause of equality.

Now let me be clear: I see gender equality as a human right. And striving for gender equality should simply be driven by human decency.

However, we also have to be realistic: not everybody in our world, or our region, shares these values.

So let me give these people another argument: gender equality and gender equity make 100 per cent business sense, and they make 100 per cent economic sense.

Every single study shows us clearly one simple truth: more diverse companies, that have more women in their teams and – crucially – in their leadership teams, perform better.

They are more creative and they are more productive.

But this is also true on a societal level. Economies that empower women, and that give young girls a good education and then allow them to pursue good careers, are thriving. Their economic growth rates are consistently higher.

The reasons are obvious. The economic success of a country depends on its people. But how can a country be successful when it uses the potential of only half its people? And how can a company be successful when it uses only half the talent pool that it could have access to?

When managers complain about a skills shortage, I have just two bits of advice for them: Offer good in-house training and boost your talent pool by ensuring gender equality in the workplace.

For us at DP World, the business argument is secondary. It’s our values that count. We push hard for more equal gender representation because it is the right thing to do. It is the moral thing to do.

We call this approach ‘Our World, Our Future’, which is the name of our sustainability strategy. Gender equality is a key part of this work. That’s why in 2015, DP World signed the United Nations Women Empowerment Principles. And in 2018, we launched #MentorHer, a global programme to support the career development of our female employees. We regularly run training programmes, like WomenLead@DPWorld, which help female managers to have maximum impact and show them a clear career path to the top.

But we also go beyond DP World and invest in the local communities where we operate. During the past year alone, we invested $1.9 million in gender equality projects that reached more than 160,000 women.

All this is a good start, but I have to be honest with you: there is still a lot more that we can achieve.

During the past 18 months, we sharply increased the number of female employees across DP World Group – from 8.9 per cent to 14.4 per cent. That’s great, but it’s not enough.

And that’s why I consider the honour of being named a HeForShe Champion also as an obligation.

We are integrating gender equality into all our processes, across all regions and departments. As I said before, we do so because it’s right, and because we are guided by the United Nations’ sustainable development goals, namely goal number 5.

So here’s my personal commitment: I will make sure that we at DP World continue to apply a gender lens to everything we do. We have to #BreakTheBias – as the official hashtag for this year’s International Women’s Day asks us to do.

And if we achieve that, then I know for sure: we can deliver a win-win-win – for society, for the economy, and for women all around the world.