Why highly educated women in MENA aren’t becoming entrepreneurs

Across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), women are reaching new heights in education. They are enrolling in universities at higher rates than men and, on average, spending more years in school.

Women now account for 43% of tertiary education enrollments, compared with 39% for men, and make up more than half of university graduates and around 57% of STEM graduates, higher than in the US and UK.

However, these academic achievements are not leading to more opportunities in entrepreneurship or leadership. Many women still face barriers to joining and staying in the workforce, and only about 3% of CEO roles in the region are held by women.

The disparity highlights a persistent education-to-entrepreneurship gap, in which women struggle to translate their academic success into business leadership, limiting both their individual career progression and the region’s broader economic potential.

BARRIERS OF SUCCESS

Dr. Salma Soliman, Assistant Professor in Management at Edinburgh Business School, Heriot-Watt University Dubai, and Center Director of the Women, Enterprise and Leadership in the Middle East, discusses this gap, noting that it often stems from limited access to startup capital, fewer professional networks, lower exposure to entrepreneurial role models, and concerns around financial risk. 

“We tend to see women graduates either resorting to other types of employment or preferring to operate informally within their local communities to minimize the risks involved.”

The gap is driven largely by culture and confidence.

Darine BenAmara, Gender Strategy Advisor and Founder and Principal Advisor at The Smart Woman Consulting, explains that while MENA education systems have produced many highly qualified women, having employment credentials is not the same as having the skills needed to start a business.

“Universities across the region train students to perform well within existing institutions, to get the grade, pass the exam, and secure the role. Entrepreneurship requires a different cognitive architecture: tolerance for ambiguity, hypothesis testing, iterative failure.”

“That architecture is largely absent from MENA curricula, for men and women alike. The difference is that men have more institutional pathways to develop these competencies outside the classroom,” she adds.

BenAmara also highlights what she calls the “absorbing state,” especially in the GCC. Here, educated women are often attracted to stable, socially accepted public-sector jobs that are close to home and meet family expectations.

“A woman graduating with a degree in business administration or engineering has a credible, family-approved path to employment. Entrepreneurship cannot compete with that offer on the terms that matter most to a 24-year-old woman navigating family and social expectations simultaneously.”

This creates a structural paradox. While Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) data show that 28.5% of women in MENA want to start a business—one of the highest rates of entrepreneurial intention globally—many struggle to make the transition.

“The aspiration is there. The institutional pathway from education into venture creation is not,” adds BenAmara.

Katie Godfrey, business strategist, podcaster, and bestselling author of Get Off the Tools, says the gap is not rooted in education but in what happens after graduation.

“The gap isn’t about ambition, capability, or education. It’s structural. It’s cultural. And it’s about what happens the moment a highly qualified woman tries to move from studying business to building one.”

Godfrey explains that the region’s systems still encourage women to choose stable jobs over taking risks as entrepreneurs. This makes it much harder for women to move from education into owning a business.

“A degree leads to a stable, respected job. Starting a business means stepping into instability, without a safety net, without a family precedent, and often without anyone around you who has done it before.” 

ACCESS AND FUNDING

While the conversation around female entrepreneurship often focuses on networking, BenAmara says, “The more structural problem is what kind of capital business in MENA actually runs on, and how that capital is transmitted.”

She explains that business in MENA often relies on trust networks formed through family businesses and long-term social ties. This puts women without a business background at a disadvantage.

“A woman entering entrepreneurship without an established family business context faces a cold-start trust problem that no formal mentorship program can substitute.”

The funding gap reflects broader structural issues in capital allocation rather than a shortage of female founders.

BenAmara says, “The problem is on the capital allocation side, where investor pattern matching systematically favors founders who reflect the demographic profile of the people writing the check.”

She adds that increasing the number of women making investment decisions could help rebalance funding outcomes, noting that venture capital firms with at least one female partner are significantly more likely to back women-led businesses.

“When women write checks, they fund different founders.”

She adds that outside venture capital, many women still have trouble securing traditional loans because they often lack the assets banks require.

“Traditional bank lending is structurally inaccessible for most women without established assets.”

While funding remains one of the most significant barriers facing female founders, Godfrey says that the problem is exacerbated by limited access to informal early-stage funding, since much of the initial capital for startups comes from family, friends, and personal contacts.

“When women are less present in senior business circles, they simply have fewer people around them who can write that first cheque or make that first introduction.”

Godfrey adds that mentorship presents a similar challenge, as the shortage of female founders and investors reduces the visibility of successful role models in entrepreneurship.

“You can’t mentor what you haven’t seen.”

While bigger changes are needed, she encourages women to take the initiative and build their own networks and support systems.

CULTURE AND FAMILY

Dr. Soliman says cultural expectations and family responsibilities continue to shape many women’s career decisions across MENA, although the extent varies by country and is gradually changing.

According to the 2024–25 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) Report, women were 47% more likely than men to close a business for family or personal reasons, highlighting the challenges many face in balancing entrepreneurship with caregiving.

At the same time, Dr. Soliman adds that the rise of flexible business models, digital technologies, and more supportive family environments is making entrepreneurship increasingly accessible to women across the region.

While cultural expectations remain a significant factor, BenAmara argues that the issue is less about risk appetite than the higher social consequences women face if a business fails.

“Women in MENA are not more risk-averse than men in some deep dispositional sense. They are accurately pricing a higher-risk environment.”

She says entrepreneurial failure often carries different social consequences for women, affecting family reputation, social standing, and, in some cases, marriage prospects.

“Business failure for a man in MENA is, broadly, a learning experience. Business failure for a woman carries qualitatively different social costs in many contexts.”

BenAmara says that addressing the issue requires reducing the stigma associated with failure rather than simply encouraging women to become more confident.

“The solution is not confidence workshops. It is reducing the social cost of failure.”

She also argues that the challenge extends beyond traditional discussions of work-life balance and is rooted in the distribution of unpaid labor.

“The precise challenge is that entrepreneurship is a time-intensive, relationship-intensive, irregular-schedule activity.”

Since women still do most of the housework and childcare, she says many face what she calls “time poverty,” which makes it much harder to start and grow a business.

CHANGING PERCEPTIONS

However, as things change, women’s perceptions of entrepreneurship are shifting as they gain access to digital technologies that enable them to reach customers and markets beyond their local communities.

“Now, the sky is the limit,” says Dr. Soliman.

Greater exposure to startup ecosystems, digital businesses, and successful regional founders is broadening the ambitions of younger women, adds Dr. Soliman, and many of whom are motivated not only by financial success but also by the opportunity to create meaningful social and economic impact.

“It’s genuinely one of the most exciting shifts I’ve watched happen in real time,” says Godfrey, adding that increased visibility of female founders through social media and digital platforms has made entrepreneurship feel more accessible than it did for previous generations.

“Entrepreneurship isn’t this distant, abstract thing anymore; it’s something they can see, follow, and picture themselves doing.”

She says younger women are becoming more confident that entrepreneurial success is attainable.

“The ambition has always been there in this region. What’s changing is the belief that it’s actually achievable. And once women believe something is possible, that’s usually when everything else starts to move.”

KEY PLAYERS

Universities have a critical role to play in helping students move beyond theoretical entrepreneurship and into practice.

“Students benefit most when they have opportunities to solve real business challenges, develop startup ideas, and present their concepts to investors,” says Dr. Soliman.

Experiential learning, incubators, mentorship programs, and internships help students build practical skills and confidence alongside technical knowledge.

“Students benefit from seeing successful women entrepreneurs as mentors and guest speakers, which makes women entrepreneurship feel more common in the entrepreneurial ecosystem,” she adds.

BenAmara argues that instead of launching more programs, the focus should be on making current ones more effective.

“My core recommendation is: stop adding programs and start changing architecture.”

She says many countries in the region already have women’s entrepreneurship programs, but few measure long-term business outcomes, making it difficult to assess their impact.

“Program proliferation without outcome accountability produces impressive launch announcements and invisible impact.”

BenAmara urges governments to use public contracts and investment policies to help women-led businesses access markets, and to make gender-related investment data more transparent.

She also thinks universities should reconsider how they teach entrepreneurship.

“The core curriculum trains for employment, and venture creation requires a different cognitive architecture.”

For the private sector, she says mentorship should become sponsorship, where influential leaders actively open doors for new entrepreneurs.

“The mentorship that actually produces ventures is sponsorship: influential people using their own capital and reputation to open doors for someone else.”