The United Arab Emirates will have fun Emirati Ladies’s Day tomorrow, twenty eighth August. Noticed yearly, the nationwide event honours the contributions and achievements of Emirati girls beneath the assist of the clever management.
This yr’s celebration can be held beneath the theme “Hand in Hand, We Have a good time 50 Years”, marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Basic Ladies’s Union. The event displays neighborhood partnership and the sustained achievements of Emirati girls over the previous 5 many years.
This yr’s theme carries profound nationwide and social that means, symbolising the participatory spirit that defines the UAE’s method to girls’s empowerment. It additionally affirms the necessity to proceed advancing by means of collaboration throughout all segments of society.
H.H. Sheikha Fatima bint Mubarak “The Mom of the Nation”, Chairwoman of the Basic Ladies’s Union (GWU), President of the Supreme Council for Motherhood and Childhood, and Supreme Chairwoman of the Household Improvement Basis (FDF), is recognised because the pioneer of the ladies’s motion within the UAE. She established the Basic Ladies’s Union with a imaginative and prescient that embraces modernity whereas safeguarding Arab and Islamic traditions.
On this event, Noura Khalifa Al Suwaidi, Secretary-Basic of GWU, stated that Emirati Ladies’s Day is a cherished nationwide event to recall the accomplishments of Emirati girls, who’ve confirmed over fifty years their potential to steer, give, and contribute successfully to the nation’s growth journey.
The GWU Secretary-Basic advised the Emirates Information Company (WAM) that the event embodies the management’s imaginative and prescient, affirming that empowering girls is crucial to advancing sustainable growth and fostering a cohesive and affluent society.
She added that the efforts of H.H. Sheikha Fatima have been pivotal in empowering Emirati girls and strengthening their function throughout social, academic and financial fields, underscoring the significance of cooperation between society and establishments in shaping a nationwide mannequin that values girls’s contributions to nation-building.
Noura Al Suwaidi famous that Emirati Ladies’s Day embodies half a century of achievements that formed the historical past of Emirati girls and laid robust foundations for real nationwide partnership.
Constructing on this legacy, the UAE ranked thirteenth globally and 1st regionally within the 2025 UNDP Gender Equality Index. Key milestones included the 2018 Cupboard approval of the primary laws on equal pay, notably Federal Decree-Regulation No. 27 of 2018 on equal pay for women and men within the federal authorities, and Federal Decree-Regulation No. 33 of 2021 regulating labour relations within the personal sector, which mandates equal pay for equal work or work of equal worth.
The launch of the UAE Nationwide Technique for Ladies Empowerment 2023–2031 constructed on these achievements in nationwide growth. Ladies now maintain 50 p.c of the Federal Nationwide Council seats, inserting the UAE among the many prime international locations for gender-balanced parliamentary illustration.
At present, 26 p.c of ministerial positions are occupied by girls, who lead key portfolios together with schooling, local weather change, neighborhood growth and household affairs. Emirati girls additionally symbolize 71 p.c of UAE nationals in the private and non-private sectors, 63 p.c of management roles within the federal authorities, and 13 p.c of the nation’s ambassadors overseas.
Emirati girls play a significant function in entrepreneurship, with greater than 25,000 businesswomen proudly owning over 50,000 industrial licences and investments exceeding AED60 billion.
In schooling and know-how, girls account for 46 p.c of STEM graduates within the UAE and comprise 50 p.c of the nationwide workforce within the house sector. Ladies additionally symbolize 55 p.c of the general labour drive.
At present, the UAE stands as a worldwide mannequin in defending girls’s rights, backed by supportive laws, together with the Structure, federal legal guidelines, ministerial and native decrees that ensured equal alternatives for women and men, alongside nationwide mechanisms and assist entities, which have performed a key function in overcoming challenges to girls’s empowerment throughout numerous sectors.
The UAE’s efforts in empowering girls have prolonged globally, with the nation launching a number of initiatives, together with the Sheikha Fatima bint Mubarak Ladies, Peace and Safety initiative. This initiative underscores the UAE’s dedication to enhancing girls’s roles in fostering dialogue, peace, safety and growth, each nationally and globally.
Different notable efforts embrace the Arab Ladies’s Financial Empowerment Observatory, adopted on the 2023 Leaders’ Summit as a platform for Arab international locations to assist girls’s entrepreneurship and develop partnerships throughout the Arab world, and the Sheikha Fatima Initiative to Empower Rural Ladies in Africa within the agricultural sector, amongst different distinctive programmes.