Re‐thinking tanawwo (diversity) and musawat (equality) in the Middle East

Women managers in the United Arab Emirates: successful careers or what?

Purpose

– The purpose of this paper is to explore the career success of women in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The paper examines the interplay of some of the macro-national and meso-organizational factors in explaining the micro-individual experiences of career success.

Design/methodology/approach

– The paper draws on in-depth interviews with 26 women managers in large private organizations in the UAE to explore whether they experienced their careers as successful or not and the measures they used to operationalize their career success.

Findings

– The findings presented in the paper support the use of a multi-level research design to capture the complexity of women's experience of career success. The findings illustrate how local cultural values, societal expectations, and organizational attitudinal and structural factors influence the experiences and the conceptualizations of career success of women in this research context.

Originality/value

– The originality of the paper is threefold. First, the value added of this research lies in exploring whether the women experienced career success or not and the reasons underscoring their experiences, before looking into how they measured that success. Second, the originality of the paper lies in adapting a relational multi-level framework that is commonly used in diversity management studies, to capture the multiple factors that impact the experiences and operationalization of career success of women. Third, the paper contributes to the limited research on the career experience of women in the UAE and the Arab Middle East in general.