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The Female Factor

A Path to Financial Equality in Malaysia

KUALA LUMPUR — Fozia Amanulla has grown accustomed to the pressures of negotiating multimillion-dollar deals during her career in Islamic finance. Some things, though, she has never gotten used to. For instance, how certain men have declined to shake her hand, ignored her when she has spoken or refused to look at her across a conference table.

At a meeting with a client in Saudi Arabia, where men and women are commonly segregated in public life, she was the only woman in the building — a fact reinforced by the absence of any toilets for women.

“There’s no such thing as the ‘tea lady’ there. It’s the ‘tea man,”’ she said in an interview in her bank’s Kuala Lumpur boardroom.

Ms. Fozia, one of the first women to lead an Islamic bank in Malaysia, has had no shortage of reminders that her industry — in which investments are made according to Islamic principles — is a male-dominated one.

But while some women in more conservative corners of the Islamic world are still fighting for the right to work outside the home in the booming Islamic finance sector, the number of female faces is multiplying.

And industry observers say it is multicultural Malaysia where women have made the greatest inroads.

The roll call of female high achievers in this Southeast Asian nation cuts across almost all aspects of the sector — from bank chief executives and scholars of Shariah, or Islamic law, to regulators like Zeti Akhtar Aziz, the central bank governor, who is widely credited with playing a leading role in transforming Kuala Lumpur into a hub for Islamic banking.

“When the G-7 finance ministers wanted to know about Islamic finance, they invited Dr. Zeti to brief them,” said Mushtak Parker, the editor of Islamic Banker, a London-based industry magazine, referring to the Group of 7 industrialized nations.

In fact, many of the women now involved in Malaysia’s industry had already risen through the ranks of conventional finance when they felt the pull of the Islamic sector — a rapidly growing global industry that Moody’s has estimated is worth about $1 trillion in value this year.

“I could see the rise of Islamic banking, and I wanted to dive into that,” said Raja Teh Maimunah Raja Abdul Aziz, who was an investment banker before joining Islamic banks in Malaysia and the Middle East. That decision eventually led to her appointment last year as global head of Islamic markets at Bursa Malaysia, the country’s stock exchange.

Women are rising up in the industry’s ranks in other countries as well, including Britain, which has also signaled its intention to become an Islamic finance hub. But Mr. Parker is among those who say that when it comes to Muslim-majority nations, Malaysian women win hands down, with Jamelah Jamaluddin leading the pack.

Ms. Jamelah was appointed managing director of RHB Islamic Bank in Malaysia in 2007 and is believed to have been the first woman in the world to head an Islamic bank.

In addition, Mr. Parker said, her appointment to the top job at the Malaysian arm of Kuwait Finance House earlier this year was the first time a Gulf-owned Islamic bank had appointed a female head. A spokeswoman said Ms. Jamelah was unavailable for an interview.

Ms. Fozia, for her part, was appointed head of Eoncap Islamic Bank in 2007 after leading the Islamic debt capital market division at AseamBankers, now known as MayBank Investment Bank, for three years.

She says men’s traditional dominance of the industry has meant that women have faced greater challenges. And Malaysian women’s success, she believes, stems largely from the fact that there is no public segregation of men and women in this country.

“Even in the past, girls and women were given equal rights in education, and parents were pushing boys and girls equally,” she said.

Even so, Engku Rabiah Adawiah, the first female Shariah adviser to be registered with the Securities Commission of Malaysia and the only female Shariah scholar on the central bank’s National Shariah Advisory Council, said that when she first started attending industry conferences, she was the only woman among the speakers.

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Fozia Amanulla, the C.E.O. and executive director of EONCAP Islamic Bank, spoke to colleagues in Kuala Lumpur.Credit...Rahman Roslan for the International Herald Tribune

Now, she says, many more women can be seen at such events, and she expects the female presence in the industry to continue growing. Three-quarters of the students she teaches at the International Islamic University of Malaysia are women.

“I think Malaysian women have always been active in trade and commerce, so it’s not something that is culturally odd for women to be at the forefront,” she said.

Ms. Raja Teh credits the availability and affordability of household help with allowing Malaysian women to progress — not only in Islamic finance but in the wider work force. Live-in maids are common among middle-class and wealthy families in Malaysia.

The mother of three children, she says some of her female banker friends in Britain have had to leave their jobs after having children because they have found it too difficult to juggle family and work.

These women believe there are few institutional barriers preventing them from progressing in Malaysia’s Islamic finance sector, but when they travel to the Middle East, they often receive stark reminders that not all women enjoy the same standing.

They say Saudi Arabia, where a woman is expected to be accompanied by a male relative when in public, presents the greatest challenges.

Ms. Fozia has taken her husband with her to Saudi Arabia to avoid potential problems, but Ms. Raja Teh, who usually wears a head scarf only when meeting Shariah scholars, has tended to push the boundaries.

She traveled to the region in her previous role as chief corporate officer and head of international business at the Malaysian arm of Kuwait Finance House. She described how guards had once stopped her from attending a meeting with her colleagues in a building in Saudi Arabia that admitted men only.

“They said, ‘You can wait at the guard house,”’ she recalled.

Asked how she coped with such setbacks, Ms. Raja Teh said: “You have to take everything with a bit of a sense of humor and not get terribly upset and appreciate that people do things differently in different places. This is very true, especially when my clients entertain and they invite me to their homes and then I end up sitting with their wives in the kitchen because the men are entertained somewhere else.”

While Ms. Raja Teh has found ways to overcome such challenges, Mr. Parker said there had been a disappointing lack of progress in the Middle East.

Despite some notable exceptions, like Nahed Taher, chief executive of Gulf One Investment Bank in Bahrain, Mr. Parker said women’s ability to progress in both Islamic and conventional finance was still restricted in many Middle Eastern countries.

“A lot of the women there envy their Malaysian cousins,” he said.

Still, while women’s progress in bank boardrooms varies greatly, banks across various regions are increasingly trying to reach out to female Muslim customers.

Linda Eagle, president of the Edcomm Group Banker’s Academy, a consulting firm based in New York, said that while branches for women only had existed in Saudi Arabia for decades, such branches had opened in Dubai, Iraq, Tanzania and Kenya in recent years. The first bank branch for women only in Iran opened in June, she said.

Banks are also devising products specifically aimed at women. In Malaysia, for example, Eoncap Islamic Bank introduced a savings product last year called An-Nisa, or “lady” in Arabic, that is available only to women and provides medical benefits like mammograms.

“Women’s banking remains a large, untapped market with enormous growth potential,” Ms. Eagle said. “Women customers are particularly appealing to Islamic banks because they generally have a lower appetite for risk and repay their debts in a manner that protects the financial interests of their families and the futures of their children.”

Even so, advocacy groups say many women remain shut out of decisions about household finances. Nazreen Nizam, a legal officer at Sisters in Islam, an advocacy group in Kuala Lumpur, said women faced discrimination in areas like Shariah inheritance law, which stipulates that if a father dies intestate, a son is entitled to larger share of his estate than a daughter.

That is why Ms. Raja Teh says it is vital that girls be taught personal finance skills at school, to help increase their confidence and their ability to have a say over money matters. Her own father, she says, began teaching her bookkeeping when she was 10.

A version of this article appears in print on   in The International Herald Tribune. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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