The Gulf’s boardrooms look different than they did five years ago. Walk into a leadership meeting at a major bank in Riyadh, a tech firm in Dubai, or an energy company in Doha today, and you’re far more likely to find a woman leading the conversation; not attending it.
That shift didn’t happen by accident. It’s the product of policy changes across the GCC, a generation of women who pushed into industries that weren’t built with them in mind, and companies that finally started promoting on merit instead of habit.
For this year’s list, Arabian Business Times set out to recognize 30 women who are genuinely moving the needle across the GCC. These are not leaders defined simply by their titles, but women who are shaping strategy, entering new markets, building strong organizations, and creating an impact that will extend far beyond their own tenure.
Some are leading publicly listed companies, while others are scaling ambitious businesses that did not exist a decade ago. Several are also redefining leadership in industries such as construction, energy, and heavy manufacturing, sectors where women have historically had limited representation at the highest levels.
Together, they represent a new generation of leadership built on influence, execution, innovation, and lasting impact.
Here’s our list for 2026, along with how we put it together.
How We Selected These Leaders
Putting this list together was not simply about finding women with impressive job titles. The Arabian Business Times editorial team researched leaders, founders, entrepreneurs, researchers, and industry professionals across the GCC to identify women creating meaningful and visible impact in their respective fields.
Our selection considered several factors:
Leadership Impact: We looked at how each individual is influencing an organization, industry, community, or professional field through her leadership, decisions, and work.
Entrepreneurship and Business Building: We considered women who have founded businesses, launched startups, developed new ventures, or built emerging brands with strong growth potential and a clear market purpose.
Innovation and Expertise: Our research also included professionals, researchers, specialists, and innovators whose ideas, knowledge, or work are contributing to the development of their industries.
Professional Track Record: We reviewed career progression, business achievements, projects, expansion milestones, initiatives, and other evidence of sustained professional impact.
Industry Influence: We considered visibility within their sector, including thought leadership, industry contributions, speaking engagements, recognition, partnerships, awards, and influence among peers.
GCC Relevance: Priority was given to women whose work has a meaningful connection to the GCC, including the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Oman. We also aimed to represent a diverse mix of industries and professional backgrounds.
Growth and Forward Momentum: Particular attention was given to leaders who are actively building, expanding, innovating, entering new markets, launching initiatives, or creating new opportunities during 2025 and 2026.
The final selection is designed to highlight different forms of leadership. Some women on this list oversee established organizations, while others are building startups, advancing research, growing independent businesses, or creating influence within specialized industries. What connects them is the measurable direction, ambition, and impact of their work.
1. May Ahmed — Founder and CEO, H&T Boutique
For May Ahmed, luxury was never just about the price tag. It started with a fascination for craftsmanship, elegance, and how a single piece could carry culture and identity within it. That belief became H&T Boutique, a luxury bags brand built around storytelling and Middle Eastern and Egyptian heritage rather than trends. “It is not simply about owning an expensive item,” she says. “It is about owning a piece with meaning.”
Her brand has since been featured in Forbes and Vogue, presented at International Fashion Weekend Dubai, and recognized with the Millionaire Award and Best International Fashion Icon Award. But she’s quick to point out that recognition followed discipline, not the other way around. Moving H&T Boutique from a local business to an internationally known name meant a complete shift in mindset, she says, and the courage to step outside familiar boundaries.
She’s equally clear-eyed about the future, believing luxury fashion’s next decade will belong to brands that blend heritage with technology, without losing what made them authentic in the first place.
Why she made the list: Because she’s proof that culture, when treated as substance rather than decoration, can become a genuine competitive edge in a global luxury market.
Follow her on Instagram: @mayahmedd_official
2. Neslihan Batum — Founder, Nest Invest
Neslihan Batum has spent eighteen years guiding international investors through some of the world’s most sought after property markets, working across Türkiye, Dubai, Cyprus and Montenegro. As founder of Nest Invest, based in Ankara, she has built a boutique advisory platform that puts the client’s interests above every transaction, often advising them to wait or walk away when an opportunity does not truly fit their goals.
Her portfolio includes notable projects such as Nest Loft in North Cyprus and Ufuk Beytepe in Ankara, along with developments in Montenegro. Alongside her real estate work, Batum serves as a Mediterranean Luxury Yacht Advisor, bringing together residences, marinas and hospitality into one connected lifestyle experience for her clients.
She believes Türkiye’s real strength lies far beyond current property prices, rooted instead in its geography, culture, tourism and long term growth story. That perspective, paired with nearly two decades of cross market experience, has made her a trusted voice for investors exploring opportunities across the wider Mediterranean region.
Why she made the list: Batum earns her place among the Top 30 Visionary Women Business Leaders in 2026 for her ability to connect real estate, lifestyle and yachting into one Mediterranean investment story, while never losing sight of protecting her clients’ long term interests.
Follow her journey on Instagram: @neslihanbatum
3. Dr. Mariam Shaikh — Founder and CEO, MS Education
With over thirty five years in international education, Dr. Mariam Shaikh has helped shape the UAE into a recognised global education hub. Her journey began in the early 1980s when she founded her own nursery school, before going on to lead a major school group as Principal, growing it to more than seven thousand students and making it one of the largest Asian schools in the UAE.
She later moved into higher education, playing a key role in establishing the University of New Brunswick’s Dubai campus, one of the first overseas branch campuses in the region. She went on to hold senior leadership roles at the Canadian University of Dubai, Heriot Watt University and Amity University Dubai.
In 2020, she founded MS Education, now a trusted advisory firm connecting universities and students across the UAE and beyond. She also works closely with UNHCR, helping provide scholarships for refugee students, and has been recognised globally, including as a Global 200 Women Power Leader in 2024.
Why she made the list: Dr. Shaikh earns her place among the Top 30 Visionary Women Business Leaders in 2026 for decades spent building bridges between global universities and students, shaping the UAE into one of the world’s most trusted education destinations.
Connect with her on LinkedIn: Dr. Mariam Shaikh
https://www.instagram.com/dr.darcellstreeter
4. Dr. Darcell L. Streeter — CEO, Women’s Circle, Inc. and Founder, B.HER™ Global
Dr. Darcell L. Streeter has built a career at the intersection of education, workforce development and social impact, driven by a belief that systems should be designed for people rather than the other way around. As CEO of Women’s Circle, Inc., she leads Circle Forward, a global learning ecosystem connecting K-12 education with adult vocational training across regions including West Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia.
Her doctoral work on generative AI and culturally responsive design shaped the S.T.R.I.P.E. Prompt Architecture, a framework helping educators use AI in ways that stay human led and culturally grounded. Through B.HER Global and the Softness as a Superpower framework, she also challenges outdated ideas about what strong leadership looks like, encouraging women to lead from wholeness rather than exhaustion.
A Learning Sciences scholar, author and global speaker, Dr. Streeter continues to build systems designed to outlast her, rooted in community, dignity and lasting transformation.
Why she made the list: Dr. Streeter earns her place among the Top 30 Visionary Women Business Leaders in 2026 for building an education model rooted in equity and belonging, proving that leadership can be both deeply human and globally scalable.
Follow her on Instagram: @dr.darcellstreeter
5. Dr. Larisa Magomatova — Pediatric Cardiologist and CHD Advocate
Dr. Larisa Magomatova has spent years at one of Europe’s largest cardiology centres and is the author of parent education books on congenital heart disease. For the past five years, she has been part of an international field mission team bringing paediatric heart surgery directly to children who cannot travel for treatment, working across countries where congenital heart care is still developing.
Since 2021, the team has completed twelve missions to Iraq, performing close to seven hundred operations with a survival rate of approximately ninety seven percent, often treating infants with complex defects who had nowhere else to turn. Magomatova believes strongly in informed families, encouraging parents to track small daily changes in a child’s behaviour and appetite to catch problems early. “Do not fear the diagnosis, seek to understand it,” she often says.
Alongside her clinical work, she remains a vocal advocate for CHD awareness, believing technology can support but never replace real conversations between doctors and families.
Why she made the list: Dr. Magomatova earns her place among the Top 30 Visionary Women Business Leaders in 2026 for her rare blend of frontline clinical courage and long term patient education, bringing life saving surgery to children who would otherwise have no access to it, while empowering families with the knowledge to act early.
Follow her on Instagram: @doctor_lara95
6. Prof. Ona C. Miller, EdD, PhD — Founder and CEO, Global Female Civility Leadership Institute
Prof. Ona C. Miller has spent over two decades focused not on leadership training, but on institution building, helping organizations design the governance structures that allow their work to outlast any single leader. As Founder and CEO of the Global Female Civility Leadership Institute, she partners with universities, governments and nonprofits to audit governance systems and build leadership pipelines built to last for generations.
Her earlier ventures include the Global Library of Female Authors, founded in 2018 to preserve women’s intellectual contributions, along with the Female Civility Initiative and National Female Civility Day. In November 2025, she launched PurposePhD, extending her advisory work into education focused on purpose driven leadership development.
She currently serves as National Chairman of the Women and Entrepreneurship Committee with the Asian African Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and is an Honorary Member of the World Peace and Diplomacy Organisation.
Why she made the list: Prof. Miller shifts the conversation from whether women belong in leadership to how their institutions can be built to endure, a distinction that has quietly reshaped how organizations think about legacy.
Connect with her on LinkedIn: Prof. Ona C. Miller
7. Dr. Tumpa Banerjee — Founder, ARTROY FZE LLC
Before committing fully to the canvas, Dr. Tumpa Banerjee built a successful career in the corporate world until a powerful creative call demanded her full devotion. Stepping away to pursue art full-time, she has since established herself across Dubai for her contemporary and abstract art, a dynamic practice centered on evocative textures, expressive form, and intuitive movement that lets each piece find its own organic life.
She was born in Lucknow, India, and today calls Dubai home. Her exhibitions have travelled to nearly twenty countries, including a UNESCO backed show in Greece, and she holds an honorary Doctor of Philosophy in Fine Arts from Maryland State University. She also curates shows for other artists and runs workshops with special needs and autistic children, where color becomes a way to say what words can’t.
Awards have followed, including the UAE Icon Global Business Leaders Summit Award and Global Women of Influence 2025. But ask her what matters most, and she’ll talk about a child finding their voice through paint, not a trophy on a shelf.
Why she made the list: Because reinvention isn’t just a talking point for her, it’s a life she actually lived, and because she turns something as personal as abstract art into a language anyone, from any background, can understand.
Follow her on Instagram: @artroy.28 | Connect on LinkedIn: Dr. Tumpa Banerjee
8. Simone La-Rose — Founder, Edited 1791
Before Dubai, Simone La-Rose spent over two decades inside London’s most respected fashion houses, including Phoebe Philo, MATCHES Fashion, Victoria Beckham and Browns, where she learned that true luxury has nothing to do with volume. When a relocation to Dubai left her searching for work, two unrelated women asked her the exact same question within hours of each other: could she come detox their wardrobes. Forty eight hours later, Edited 1791 was born.
Her approach isn’t styling, it’s editing. Most clients, she found, were only wearing thirty percent of what they owned. Through a five stage process, from The First Draft to The Manuscript, she strips away the noise until a wardrobe finally makes sense, keeping the pieces that matter and clearing out the rest. “Buy only what you love, edit tremendously,” she says, echoing a lesson from her early mentor, Browns founder Joan Burstein.
Deliberately faceless as a brand, Edited 1791 puts the client at the center, not its founder, a rare choice in an industry built on personal visibility.
Why she made the list: Because she turned a deeply personal insight into a genuine business category, proving that in luxury, subtraction can be more powerful than addition.
Follow on Instagram: @edited1791_dxb
Soon More Leaders Will Be Added here
CLOSING
Thirty names can’t capture everything happening across the Gulf’s business landscape right now; there are dozens of other women doing equally consequential work outside this list, and that’s exactly the point. The bench is deep, and it’s getting deeper every year.
What stands out looking at this year’s group as a whole isn’t just seniority. It’s range; women leading in sectors that were closed to them a generation ago, and doing it while based in the region, not despite it.
We’ll be revisiting this list annually. If there’s a leader you think we should be watching for next year, Contact us — we’re always tracking who’s next.
