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The United Arab Emirates is to insist on at least one female director on the boards of all listed companies. The requirement came into force following the Securities and Commodities Authority’s meeting on 14 March 2021.
“We previously used to accept explanations if there wasn’t compliance, but now we are moving to make female representation compulsory,” the regulator’s chief executive officer Obaid Saif Al Zaabi explained. “So now there must be at least one female member on the board of any listed company.”
The change comes after the UAE’s central bank signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Aurora50, a firm focused on gender-balanced boardrooms, to raise the number of women on the boards of both public and private companies in the UAE.