When women lead, innovation accelerates

I have been thinking about silence and how it settles around women who are told to wait, lower their voices, and soften their ambition until meaning blurs. Breaking that silence rarely arrives as a spectacle. It happens in decisive moments when a woman keeps going even when the room is not ready. This spirit framed the panel I moderated on women leading transformation and innovation.

A picture emerged of progress and its limits. Globally, women still hold less than a third of senior leadership roles, and only a small share of the world’s largest companies are led by women. In the GCC, the numbers are lower, with only a small fraction of board seats held by women. In Oman, women are the majority of higher education graduates, yet this is not reflected in leadership. In the 2023 national elections, no woman was elected to Majlis Ash’shura, and following the 2020 reshuffle at several government-linked companies, female representation on some boards appears to have decreased to date. These patterns point to selection and promotion systems designed without a key demographic in mind.

Ambition is not the barrier. Surveys show that most young women want promotions and expect to lead. The difficulty lies in the first step into management, where men are more often promoted. This early gap narrows the pool of experienced women considered for senior roles years later.

In finance and corporate strategy, women are highly visible in sustainability work, women hold roughly 63 per cent of Chief Sustainability Officer roles worldwide, yet remain underrepresented among CFOs and CEOs with authority over capital. In Saudi Arabia, the number of licensed female lawyers has grown from none in 2013 to more than a thousand a decade later, expanding client-facing and advisory work even as leadership tracks lag. In engineering and energy, progress depends on psychological safety, which research identifies as a primary driver of high-performing teams. In sports, women continue to navigate constraints around visibility, mobility and resources alongside performance expectations.

Three threads carried the conversation. Support showed up as structure rather than sentiment. Formal mentorship and sponsorship correlate with higher promotion and retention, and the most durable examples are networks that share access and opportunity across organisations. Resilience appeared as strategic endurance through pivots, parallel platforms, and consistent performance where women are few, reinforced by allies and by clear, objective criteria for advancement. Creativity took the form of institutional innovation. Women redesigned processes that determine outcomes: how performance is evaluated, how safety is defined, how athletic programmes are built for girls and women, and how clients are served in conservative markets.

Oman offers an image that belongs to both memory and possibility: the sabla. A place where voices meet, where decisions take shape, and where presence is shared. Imagine a women’s sabla alive with exchange, not symbolic but tangible, stretching across sectors and cities. A circle of support where access is passed hand to hand, where insight is multiplied, where resources flow like conversation. Such a sabla strengthens the boardroom by ensuring women arrive not as exceptions, but as participants already equipped.

Women are already leading sustainability portfolios, building cross-border enterprises, and setting culture in teams that perform at a high level. The highest seats will diversify faster when promotions are equitable at the first step, sponsorship becomes a norm, and selection criteria are transparent and tied to outcomes. If innovation and growth are priorities in the region, systems must match the talent already available. A future shaped by women will not arrive by chance but will be carefully built with bridges already standing and voices that refuse to fade.