Equality is defined. The challenge is making it real

Lebanon has many educated and qualified women, it has also however, a problem keeping them in the economic and leadership pipeline. World Bank data for 2023 put women’s labor-force participation at 22.2%, compared with 66.7% for men. The gap therefore appears after education: between qualification, employment, career continuity and access to decision-making. 

That was the central issue running through the Women Leading Change, Gender-Responsive Leadership in Mediterranean Universities and Municipalities event held at the Lebanese University in Beirut on September 24. Gielan El Messiri, UN Women Representative in Lebanon, put it simply: “The question is not if women can lead, they can. The question is whether they will be able to.” For El Messiri, the challenge has moved beyond defining equality. It is now about turning commitments into institutions that make equality possible in practice. 

Rights on paper, barriers in practice

El Messiri distinguished between formal equality and substantive equality. Lebanon still has laws that treat women and men differently, including the nationality law, which does not allow Lebanese women to pass nationality to their children on the same basis as Lebanese men. But she argued that removing discriminatory laws is only one part of the problem. Even where rights formally exist, women also need the institutions, services and conditions that allow them to exercise those rights in practice.

“The challenge is no longer defining what equality means,” El Messiri said. “The challenge is to turn it into practical means, to actually do it.” Her point was broader than any single law. Other interventions during the event highlighted the distance between a right and the services needed to use it: legal assistance, shelters, medical documentation, economic independence and accessible state support. A right may exist in legislation while the burden of exercising it still falls heavily on the individual woman or on civil society. 

Where the pipeline starts to leak

Speaking during the panel “Building Pathways to Women’s Leadership: Higher Education, Professional Life and Entrepreneurship,” Abir Chebaro, a gender and public-policy expert with the Lebanese League for Women in Business (LLWB) , described the economic side of the problem as a “leaking pipeline.” Women may enter the workforce after completing their education, she explained, but many leave at different stages as care responsibilities increase and workplace support remains limited.

The gap already appears between education and employment. Chebaro cited 2022 figures showing women strongly represented in tertiary education, while young women were also more likely than young men to be outside education, employment or training. She linked this to the “MENA paradox”: women may be educated but still struggle to enter the labor market because of skills mismatches and wider systemic barriers.

One of the biggest losses, she said, comes with motherhood. “Care work is not a women’s issue. It is an economic issue.” Without paternity leave, return-to-work policies and better support for caregiving, women may leave the workforce in their late twenties and again later in life when caring for elderly parents.

Those who remain can still face what Chebaro called the “broken rung”: barriers to moving from employment into management and senior leadership. She said women are often judged on what they have already achieved, while men are more readily assessed on potential. UN Women’s 2024 Gender Statistical Profile found that women represented 27% of people in managerial positions in Lebanon in 2022.

According to Chebaro, the solution is not only to train women but to change the institutions around them. She pointed to gender audits, mentoring, partnerships with universities and employers, and stronger workplace policies. She also stressed that barriers begin before the workplace itself: cultural expectations about what girls and boys are “supposed” to do start early and continue to shape women’s careers later on.

From empowerment projects to institutions

For Chebaro, this is why one-off training is not enough. She described LLWB’s approach as a “360-degree strategy”: training women, but also connecting them to mentors, networks, value chains, financing and institutions that can open the next door. “Networks open opportunities,” she said. “People start to know you and to say your name in rooms where opportunities and decisions are being discussed.”  

The objective, she added, is not to keep women as recipients of support. “We do not want them to be only clients. We want them to really become shapers of the economy.” That requires businesses and public institutions to examine their own recruitment, retention and promotion systems, rather than simply asking women to adapt. Chebaro pointed to gender audits, action plans, measurable targets and staff training as tools for making that change more permanent. 

This is where El Messiri’s institutional argument and Chebaro’s economic one meet. Lebanon already has educated women, women-led businesses, civil-society organizations and repeated commitments to gender equality. The harder test is whether those commitments survive outside a conference room: in nationality law, care policies, hiring, promotion, parental leave, access to services and the rules determining who remains in the workforce long enough to reach leadership.