Women at the Startup Helm“Sorry to disappoint anyone,” Alex Tohme said to me in an elegant, deep, last-century British accent, “My e-commerce startup is not focusing on ‘sexy kinky lingerie’ because that doesn’t address the issue that women really want. They want advice, they want answers to their bra problems, and they want to feel like someone is focusing on their feelings and not their wallets. Every woman should be celebrated no matter the shape and size.”
I met Alex first at Omar Christidis’ ArabNet in Beirut in 2012, which she helped organize, and later in a café by her offices in Dubai. As a digital marketing executive at Western ad agencies like Ogilvy One in the Middle East, she has built a following as an at times shockingly blunt blogger on the startup ecosystem in the region. Lebanese born, Saudi raised, she was sent off to Britain for high school, and then in 1998 she passed the Regular Commissions Board for entry into Sandhurst, the United Kingdom’s high school version of West Point. After studying psychology at the University of Manchester, she returned to the region in 2006, intrigued by the early days of the rise of the digital economy. One does not forget her.
She is launching amourah.com as the first underwear shopping blog and e-commerce platform in the Middle East. Her first blog post described bluntly how difficult it could be to find personal clothing that fit well, and not feel uncomfortable shopping in a public place. “I think it’s the first time anyone actually showed their boobs in a bra in this region!” she laughs. “But I’m still alive and haven’t been arrested. Women reached out with the same experiences and questions I had. If you take the risk it gives others confidence to follow.”
Tohme has experienced significant pushback in what she acknowledges remains a heavily male-dominated retail industry. “I’ve even had some men tell me that women empowerment won’t work,” she pauses incredulously. “We are talking about a shopping experience for and about women. Women are more likely to admit where their skills are and where their weaknesses are and seek out people who can fill that gap.” She believes that while the ecosystem is deeply challenged, something new is happening with women stepping up to lead. “Everyone says the Middle East isn’t ready for X, Y, or Z but nobody knows until you try. Most of the time the market is ready, it’s just that there isn’t anyone around with the balls enough to do something about it.”
Her anatomical analogy stayed with me later that day on my ArabNet panel when I received the greatest reaction I ever received on any stage. Event founder Christidis, who is an exceptional, thoughtful, and provocative moderator, pushed us to speculate on why the Middle East seemed to be lagging behind other emerging markets in startups. “Do we not think big enough?” he asked with exasperation, and then channeling Alex, “Do we merely lack balls?” I looked over at him and winked, “Well, the first thing you can do is promise never to ask about balls again. In my experience, some of the greatest innovation is coming from women.” The room—all of the women and not a few, perhaps sheepish men—erupted in applause.
Like many of my fellow westerners, I once harbored the one-dimensional view of the Middle East that we often see on the news—a series of male-dominated societies where, in places like Saudi Arabia, women cannot even legally drive. After all, I often play a thought experiment with my friends in Silicon Valley, asking them to name five women general partners in venture capital firms or how many women engineers they have on their teams. Given how often such questions are met with silence here, I assumed female representation in the Middle East must be near nonexistent.
There is no question that men are more common on the tech scene in the Middle East. At the same time, one still sees a striking number of women at every gathering and meetup. Hala Fadel, who runs the Middle East MIT Business Plan Competition, sees the number of women applicants increasing each year, from an already surprisingly high base. In 2012, more than 4,500 teams of three people or more competed. “That means over 13,000 potential entrepreneurs,” she told me. “Teams that included women were near 48 percent! How many Silicon Valley competitions can say that?”
The answer is none. The rising role of women in the Middle East mirrors the rising role and impact of women across emerging growth markets. I wanted to understand the background of this rise more clearly, and to explore the opportunities some women entrepreneurial leaders are creating.
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One must be cautious about painting a region as rich and diverse as the Arab world with a broad brush. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and the Gulf States tend to be significantly more restrictive than Egypt or the Levant, and they pay a significant price for it economically. According to a recent Booz study of women’s role in Gulf region, women actually represent the better-educated talent pool than the greater population but a drastically higher percentage of the unemployed. “Women in Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia constitute 67 percent, 63 percent, and 57 percent respectively of university graduates,” the study found. In countries like Kuwait, however, nearly 80 percent of the unemployed are women.1
Whether in the Gulf, Egypt, or Levant, however, one can find examples of both the old and new narratives just about everywhere. “Don’t get me wrong,” one twenty-something B2B CEO from Beirut told me, “too many men here, especially older investors, judge us in an old lens and it can be a problem.” Another entrepreneur from Alexandria, who has developed a regional portal to connect mothers and their children, added, “Believe me, being a woman entrepreneur is very hard—being a wife, a mother, a daughter puts real pressure on us, we can feel real guilt under the weight of expectations. But at the same time being an entrepreneur is not mutually exclusive.” And yet another social network founder from Cairo challenged why I was making any distinction. “We are not women entrepreneurs,” she chastised me. “We are entrepreneurs who are women. We face all the same issues as any entrepreneur. If anything, as women, we probably work harder, are better collaborators, better at just getting things done than a lot of men.”
Whatever one’s perception of the Middle East, significant change has been well underway for years. And the crucial role of women in economic development is a global phenomenon. As every study of women’s impact on society demonstrates—most recently the World Bank 2012 Gender and Equality and Development Report—that while gaps remain, women have an ever-increasing role in job creation, business creation, and consumer economic activity across every industry. It is no surprise that with access to technology, they are hungrier than anyone to create.2
Alyse Nelson, CEO of Vital Voices, Hillary Clinton’s nongovernmental organization that trains and invests in emerging women leaders around the world, told me that she sees the change in the Middle East as part of a global shift. “We see women closing the gap with men in areas of economic development and girls’ education,” she told me, “but the greatest unfinished business in the twenty-first century is that women still lag significantly in leadership, power, and decision making.” She has found worldwide that women hold less than 20 percent of the seats in parliament and fewer of the C-level positions or board seats in larger corporations. “The exciting thing, however,” she notes, “is that the power dynamic has shifted dramatically in recent years with access to social networks and mobile devices. Agency—real influence in making change—is no longer just wielded from the corner office, but also from a Twitter account. Technology is changing everything—breaking down cultural barriers that once held women back and creating innovative opportunities to make positive change.”
In her book, also titled Vital Voices, Nelson tells the story of online activist Manal al-Sharif, who took on the Saudi “tradition” of not allowing women to drive. She not only began to drive, but she videotaped herself doing so and put it on YouTube, where it instantly went viral. As far back as 2008, Egyptian Esraa Abdel Fattah set up one of the first Facebook groups in the Middle East to promote a day of civil disobedience to protest low wages at a textile factory. It soon had 77,000 followers. The essence, Nelson told me, is, “One day women thought we have no voice—they see this and say, now we have a voice.” The multiplier effect is profound. Vital Voices and Yahoo! partnered to host a “Change Your World Conference” in Egypt. Women by the hundreds who had never met before, except online, came together not only to share strategies and ideas, but also to push each other to make their voices heard.3
Ruth Messinger sees the multiplier effect of women active in their economies. Since 1998, she has served as chair of the American Jewish World Service, which has funded nearly 400 grassroots organizations working to promote health, education, economic development, disaster relief, and social and political change throughout the developing world.
“We in the west sometimes don’t fully appreciate how women are the lynchpins of the family,” she told me in her Manhattan office, which buzzes with her eager young team. “Women play an extraordinary role that keep the families together and functioning. When I think even in my home, I have to constantly remind my husband to call his family, it reminds me that throughout society things just get dropped when women don’t step up.”
She continues, “In emerging worlds, there are many ways women are codified as second-class citizens—how they dress, what education they are expected to receive. They see themselves as caregivers first and foremost—up (to parents); sideways (spouses and siblings), and down (children.) At the same time, most people underestimate their role as providers at the professional level. When you stop to think that there is something like one to two billion subsistence farmers in the world, and 60 to 80 percent of them are women, it should make us all rethink what their economic role already means.” In addition so many women have viewed their roles—and thus their work—as not something one can get paid for. “Men all over the world presume they will be paid for their labor, but most women just do things even outside their homes—start a small health center, offer tutoring—and it doesn’t occur to them they should even be paid for it. That is starting to change.”
When women do become significant breadwinners in emerging markets, the first thing they do with their own income is invest it. “We know from all the work we do in microfinance, when women have disposable income they invest in the places that have the highest multiplier effect of getting their families out of poverty: in education and welfare of their kids. Men are more often likely to drink it up.” Furthermore, women seem invariably driven to think ahead, weighing the ramifications of each step. “Again, look at microfinance. Ninety percent of the women tell us that the minute they receive a loan, $14 or whatever, it is the only shot to remove them from the wage slave thing. They will never not pay back what they owe, because if they blow this money they know they’ll be handed a broom and paid 10 cents.”
Technology is opening new problem solving throughout such communities. According to the International Finance Corporation (IFC), both mobile and computer usage in women-run businesses are about the same as men, approaching 90 percent, and over two-thirds regularly access the internet. Access and outcomes are found in pretty surprising quarters. In fact, the young women in Yemen from the previous chapter are a few of thousands. Messinger explained to me, “Give a woman a cell phone and the capacity to recharge and watch them build a kiosk so people will pay them to make a call. Allow women access to an anonymous cell phone number where they can report abuse, have their stories anonymously vetted, justice can be offered. I know one entrepreneur in India who built this service, and they see themselves not only as protecting human rights, but offering a form of journalism to a community that has no newspapers. He’s gathering reporting, checking it out, reporting it on mobile phones and making sure authorities follow-up. Others in Africa are offering similar services to combat corruption.” Stories like these are unsurprising to Ghada Howaidy in Cairo, who runs institutional development at the American University of Cairo’s School of Business. She explained to me that a large, informal, less tech entrepreneurial movement has been happening among young women in Egypt for over a decade. Many women may have come from other professions, but for other reasons—passion for an idea, lifestyle, raising kids—decide to start businesses from home. “Such businesses may start more traditionally—food catering, home accessories, or jewelry,” she notes. “But it is no surprise that easy access to technology is not only driving those businesses but allowing women to create regional, maybe even global, online-only businesses.”
The breadth of women-founded tech startups in the Arab world is stunning and inspirational, but also instructive as a window into the opportunities emerging in the region. They cross every corner of the Improvisers, the Problem Solvers, and the Global Players, but I examined four other common groupings: offering services in Arabic; helping other families achieve work/life balance; leveraging experiences from the Arab Spring to create collaborative crowd sharing platforms; and developing scalable women-focused retail and e-commerce platforms.
