While Indian lawmakers still debate over the much-awaited Women’s Reservation Bill, which provides 33% of the seats in the Lok Sabha, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has recently named nine women as cabinet members.
This week, all the current ministers took their oaths before the Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, with HH Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, also in attendance.
Nearly 30% of the UAE Cabinet is female, almost the same as the UK government and higher than many countries, including India, where 22% of cabinet ministers are women.
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However, last year too, the UAE appointed seven women as cabinet ministers.
In the current NDA government in India, there are six women who hold cabinet ministry positions.
With defence minister Nirmala Sitharaman recently getting cabinet rank, the Narendra Modi government has six women ministers in charge of portfolios such as foreign affairs, information and broadcasting, women and child development, and sanitation.
They are Sushma Swaraj as foreign minister, Smriti Irani as I&B and textiles minister, Uma Bharati as drinking water and sanitation minister, Akali Dal leader Harsimrat Kaur as food processing industries minister and Maneka Gandhi as women and child development minister. However, according to The Times of India, the number is higher in terms of previous governments. After its reshuffle in 2012, the Manmohan Singh ministry had two women cabinet ministers, Kumari Selja and Chandresh Kumari Katoch.
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Interestingly, with nine ministerial positions out of 31 now held by women, the UAE is more gender-equal than Donald Trump’s cabinet, which has only four.
The National reported that most of the women are in their 30s or younger. Shamma Al Mazrui, the minister of youth, is the youngest. Appointed last year when she was only 22, she remains the youngest minister in the world, while Zaki Nusseibeh, born in Jerusalem in 1946, is the most senior among them.
In India, on September 12 was the 20th anniversary of the 108th Constitution Amendment Bill, or the Women’s Reservation Bill, since it was first tabled in Parliament. It still only managed to get the clearance of the Rajya Sabha so far much drama in both houses of Parliament, with many even attempting to physically attack the then Rajya Sabha chairman Hamid Ansari, to disrupt its tabling.
The UAE became the first nation to name a ministry dedicated to Artificial Intelligence. The first state minister for Artificial Intelligence is 27-year-old Omar Bin Sultan Al Olama.
