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Much of the contemporary policy debates about gender in the Arab world detail gender inequalities in virtually every aspect of public life. Although gender disparities are global phenomena, gender inequalities in health, educational, political and economic opportunity, legal access, and citizenship rights are often cited as inimitable characteristics of the Arab region. Indeed, despite the diversity of economic, political, and legal conditions among Arab countries, they all situated among the lowest ranking countries on a variety of global gender empowerment indices. Calls for reform by indigenous activists, women's groups, and Arab development experts in addition to the mounting “external” pressure from global economic and political actors place Arab women at the center of dominant discourses on modernity, progress, and competitiveness. This leaves policy makers in the Arab world with the serious challenge of responding with appropriate prescriptions that range from individual empowerment strategies that attempt to “fix the women” to institutional and national level interventions that require nothing short of a paradigm shift.
However, there are a number of serious challenges facing a research and policy agenda of social transformation and gender equality in the Arab world. Obstacles include the futility of androcentric approaches to meaningful knowledge production, problematic ethnocentric approaches to public policy, lack of accurate data, and a sufficiently supportive environment for networks of scholarship to thrive at the regional level. To address these issues, the Dubai School of Government's Gender and Public Policy Program aims to support theoretically and methodologically rigorous research that conceptualizes, problematizes, and analyzes gender gaps in the Arab world while, at the same time, linking the research to agendas and instruments for informed policy action. In addition to applied policy research the program aims to support the production of innovative social science scholarship on gender in the Arab world which interrogates androcentric biases and challenges ethnocentric assumptions about women in the Arab world. As part of a leading regional institution with strong links to the international community, the Gender and Public Policy Program is well positioned to create a network of regional and international scholars that can contribute to an empowering discourse about men and women in the Arab world.
The Gender and Public Policy Program aims to contribute to the academic scholarship on gender and public policy in the Arab world while simultaneously incorporating gender perspectives on public policy into the education of future and current leaders taught and trained at the Dubai School of Government. In addition to collaborating with academic institutions, the program forges partnerships with private sector organizations, government agencies, and policy makers to act as a platform for influencing public policies affecting the lives of women and men in the Arab world. The program also seeks to synergize and work closely with other DSG programs and initiatives on joint research projects on the topics of youth, e-government, public management, and entrepreneurship. Thus far, the scope of the research and programmatic activities conducted under the DSG Gender and Public Policy Program has covered the 22 Arab countries, including all GCC countries (Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and UAE).
 Gender and Public Policy Program Brochure
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