Emirates Global Aluminium (EGA), the largest industrial company in the United Arab Emirates outside oil and gas, said women now hold a quarter of its supervisory positions — a milestone it disclosed as it marks International Women in Engineering Day.
Reaching 25 per cent women in supervisory roles fulfils a target EGA set in 2021, when the figure stood at 18 per cent, to hit that level by the end of 2025. The awareness day, observed annually on 23 June, spotlights the work of women engineers and the stubborn gender gap that persists across the profession.
EGA, owned equally by Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala Investment Company and the Investment Corporation of Dubai, runs aluminium smelters at Jebel Ali in Dubai and Al Taweelah in Abu Dhabi and ranks among the world’s largest producers of the metal. Heavy industry of that kind has long been overwhelmingly male, making workforce composition a closely watched measure of change.
The company’s intake of women has accelerated. More than 200 women joined EGA in 2025, including 113 Emirati nationals, and it now employs over 830 women — more than 60 per cent of them in operational roles tied to engineering, according to the company.
“Advancing women’s role in industry is essential to building a future-ready workforce that drives excellence,” said Abdulnasser Bin Kalban, EGA’s chief executive. “The progress we have achieved reflects our belief that diverse organisations perform better. That’s why we are focused on creating an inclusive environment, and why we will continue to create opportunities for women to contribute, grow, and lead EGA’s and the UAE’s long-term success.”
The push extends into recruitment and training. EGA said it brought 199 young UAE nationals, among them 95 women, into its National Training and Graduate Training programmes last year. The schemes prepare high-school graduates for technical and administrative posts across the company’s industrial facilities and offices.
Its overall numbers, however, underline how far heavy industry still has to go. Women account for about 12 per cent of EGA’s total workforce, including frontline operators, and the company is targeting 15 per cent across all roles by the end of 2026.
EGA pointed to several initiatives behind the shift. In early 2025 it launched Ershaad, a mentorship programme pairing EGA specialists with female UAE students to encourage careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. In 2023 it started the Challenger Programme, which brings industrial firms together to tackle shared barriers to gender diversity, and has worked with the American University of Sharjah to research what keeps women out of the heavy-industrial workforce. An internal Women’s Network, established in 2020, offers a platform for leadership development and peer support.
The announcement lands amid a wider UAE drive to raise both Emirati and female participation in the workforce, with STEM education and industrial employment a particular focus of national economic plans. For EGA, the harder test will be whether a quarter of supervisory roles eventually translates into more women in its most senior engineering and leadership positions.
