Integrating Women Part and Parcel of “Omanization” Of Nation’s Work Force

by Richard H. Curtiss

“Omanization” is the Omani government’s fast-moving program to integrate more and more Omanis into positions that up to now have been held by foreign nationals. These positions range across the economic and professional scale, from medical doctors and commercial airline pilots through clerical positions in both the government and private sectors to electricians, plumbers and auto mechanics.

Every developing country, whether rich or poor, is doing something similar, but Oman’s program has broad and urgent goals. Petroleum prices dropped rapidly in 1998 to their lowest point in a generation, and extracting and pumping oil from Oman’s interior plateau costs much more than collecting and transporting petroleum in Saudi Arabia or Kuwait, where oil literally bubbles from the ground in desert fields close to sea ports or to major pipelines connected to the ports. So while Saudi Arabia still can depend upon petroleum sales to finance government programs, Oman has to move rapidly to conserve its dwindling foreign exchange.

That means replacing foreign workers with Omanis at all levels as rapidly as possible. But in a country that had only three schools prior to 1970, there are few educated middle-aged workers. Oman must depend upon its trained young people to fill the gap, and this obviously means women as well as men in what once was one of the most traditional societies in the Arab world.

The results are visible everywhere. For example, the smiling stewardesses on Omani Airways planes, which provide domestic flights between the country’s far-flung cities, are Omani. So are about half the clerks who sell tickets in the offices of foreign airlines, and who check in passengers at the airport.

Many of the men and women who clean the rooms in Oman’s five-star hotels are Omanis, a nearly unique situation among Arab countries of the Gulf where such work still is disdained by nationals in the UAE, Qatar or Kuwait, necessitating the import of service personnel from as far away as the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Indonesia.

The aspect of Omanization that most startles regular visitors to the Gulf countries is the degree to which Omani women are employed at all levels. While some women visiting Oman’s capital area from inland towns and villages still wear face masks that permit only their eyes to show, they are attended in shops, banks and clinics by unveiled Omani women, some wearing Islamic head scarves with their brightly patterned blouses and skirts, and others dressed indistinguishably from Western women.

Nor are Omani women clustered at any particular rung of the economic/professional ladder. They are in businesses, banks, serve in the medical field as both physicians and nurses, and are visible at all levels in government offices. There are at least four women serving as undersecretaries (the top-ranking career civil service position in each government ministry) and many at the director-general level, meaning that they head a major governmental department.

There even are two elected women politicians, one from Muscat and one from nearby Seeb, site of the country’s international airport, who have served since 1994 in the Majlis al Shura, Oman’s 82-member consultative council. Members of this body advise Sultan Qaboos and also interrogate members of his cabinet on behalf of their constituents in the same manner that a member of parliament would function in a parliamentary democracy.

The representative from Muscat is Mrs. Shukoor Alghamary, who served as an Omani Foreign Ministry official from the time she finished her university studies until the birth of the first of her three sons 18 years ago. After leaving the Foreign Ministry she remained active as a women’s association volunteer, participating in women’s educational activities and providing training, counseling and other assistance to girls and women.

When the last of her sons entered school in 1994, Mrs. Alghamary’s husband, Qais Al Asfoor, a successful furniture manufacturer, urged her to become a candidate for election to the Majlis al Shura. In doing so, she was one of 27 women who stood for election in nationwide elections.

The Majlis al Shura includes a representative from each of Oman’s 55 wilayats (provinces) and two representatives for wilayats with more than 30,000 inhabitants, bringing the total of members up to 82.

Four candidates were elected to represent Muscat, and of these Sultan Qaboos nominated two, including Mrs. Alghamary, to serve in the Majlis. The seat she occupies was not reserved for a woman, so in running successfully in an election in which only 30 percent of the voters were women, Mrs. Alghamary obviously received a high percentage of the votes of male voters as well. She ran and won again in 1997.

Mrs. Alghamary was better educated than other women of her generation, having received her secondary education in Bahrain, to which her parents had moved so that their daughters could receive the kind of education that was virtually unavailable in Oman before 1970. She then received her university education in Egypt. But she and her fellow female Majlis member are forerunners for a whole generation of university-educated Omani women moving into the work force in the 1990s.

Since joining the Majlis al Shura, Mrs. Alghamary has traveled to Pakistan and the United States in 1995, and at the end of 1998 to Qatar, another Gulf Cooperation Council member state where women are running for elective office.

It is remarkable that although Oman was the last of the GCC countries to inaugurate universal education, its young people already are in the forefront of those countries both in achieving gender equality in the workplace, and also in assuming full responsibility at all levels for running their country’s affairs.

Richard Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.