Bridging the Gulf: Women architects in the UAE

31 January 2013 Last updated at 21:03 ET By Razia Iqbal BBC News

Some in the West get the impression that the Middle East offers women little in the way of equal opportunities but, in the United Arab Emirates, female architects are helping design and build their own cities.

In the past decade, the Dubai skyline has been utterly transformed, with steel and glass towers emerging out of the desert at a striking rate.

And the biggest of them all - the Burj Khalifa - puts Dubai on the world map, as the city with the tallest building in the world, its tip piercing the clouds and forcing the eye ever upwards.

It is this huge building boom which partly explains why a surprisingly disproportionate number of women are choosing to study architecture. Pallavi Dean is a startling figure on a building site - eight and a half months pregnant, wearing a shiny, pink, hard hat.

When I joined her on the site, she and I were the only women there, and I looked on in admiration as she negotiated with engineers and designers, plans in her hand and handing out instructions. Educated in the United Arab Emirates, Pallavi is in no doubt that there is a connection between the building boom and the rising number of young women studying architecture.

"The ratio is 80% women and 20% men, yet that figure is the other way around in the workforce. I've always wondered why."

In addition to working and raising a family, Pallavi Dean lectures at the American University at Sharjah, where she hopes she presents the young women with a solid role model of combining the profession with family.

The university is only 15 years old. Before the huge marble and stone campus sprang up - with its vast courtyards and a nod to Arab aesthetic in the arched windows and geometric mosaics - it was largely sand dunes.

Sitting talking to three women and two men in their final year of their five-year course, I was struck by their innate confidence. All three women - Fatima al-Zaabi, Fatma Abdulla Hussain, and Ruba al-Araji - have a determination and energy to succeed.

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Bridging the Gulf: Women architects in the UAE