Bahrain Promotes Women’s Empowerment Despite Criticism From Clerics
(ANALYSIS) In the past three years, Bahrain, a small Middle Eastern country off the coast of the Arabian Peninsula, has been promoting women’s empowerment despite its strict religious laws and criticism from religious clerics.
In a country of 1.59 million people, only 38% of the population is female. The population skews heavily for men because of a very large community of male expatriate workers from Asian countries.
For women, economic necessity and government empowerment initiatives push them toward careers and engaging with the marketplace, but traditional societal norms and structural barriers still block many of them out.
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Last year, Bahrain's Supreme Council for Women, which aims to empower women and champion their rights across a range of fields and to develop and monitor their roles, launched a comprehensive national plan prioritizing family stability, economic participation, decision-making roles and quality of life for women.
This strategy includes gender-responsive budgeting, policy reviews, training initiatives and legal support to strengthen women’s role in leadership, the workforce and society.
According to 2025 Global Gender Gap Report, released by the World Economic Forum, Bahrain climbed 12 places globally, now ranking 104th out of 148 countries, with a score improvement from 66.6 percent in 2024 to 68.4 percent in 2025.
Women, Business and the Law 2024, an index published by the World Bank covering 190 economies and organized around the working woman’s life cycle, reported that Bahrain scored above the regional average. The tiny island nation received a top rating for its laws protecting women’s wages and for measures that lower obstacles preventing women from starting or running businesses.
There have been some reported successes. Bahrain has the highest proportion of female entrepreneurs in the world, with 18% of entrepreneurial start-ups operating in the kingdom founded by women, compared with London (15%) and Silicon Valley (16%).
In 2025, the country launched the Bahrain Skills and Gender Parity Accelerator initiative to adopt a proactive strategy to prepare its workforce for future jobs while increasing opportunities for women.
With a focus on bridging the gender gap, both public and private sectors have implemented various initiatives and programs to empower women with the necessary digital skills.
Bahrain ranked first globally in multiple subcategories within Meta’s Inclusive Internet Index 2022, which focused on several areas, including national female e-inclusion policies and female digital skills training. The list revealed the kingdom’s leading position on female tech-inclusion, with initiatives such as Women in FinTech.
Bahraini women are the most liberally educated in the MENA (Middle Eastern and North African) region, and they are walking a path to claiming their rights.
An uphill battle
Sharia law, derived from the Quran and Hadith, has continued to constrain progress in women’s rights. Although Bahrain joined the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women in 2002, it entered reservations on provisions conflicting with Sharia, including citizenship transfer, mobility, equality in marriage, family life and non-discrimination in state policies.
In 2017, Bahrain’s Ministry of Islamic and Judicial Affairs announced a new policy requiring Bahraini women under the age of 45 to be accompanied by a male guardian in order to go on a religious pilgrimage in Mecca.
In 2009, Bahrain’s legislative authorities formalised part of the personal status law, permitting women to give consent to marriage and adding stipulations to the marriage contract.
Amid resistance from prominent clerics and academics, Shia family law codification was abandoned, limiting the law to Sunni Muslims. Later, in 2017, the comprehensive Family Law was fully enacted, extending legal regulation of marriage, divorce, and custody to both Sunni and Shia courts.
Despite inheritance being a protected right regulated by Sharia, women still receive half the share allotted to men. Additionally, the Constitution still describes the family as the “cornerstone of society, the strength which lies in religion, ethics and patriotism,” meaning the nation still believes in a traditional and conservative role for women.
But Bahrain, led by a Sunni monarchy, is targeting Shia institutions and clerics in the name of reforms and protection of women’s rights.
After 2011, the government promoted the slogan “reforming religious discourse”.
Critics have said that it functioned as a mechanism to regulate and restructure Sunni and Shia religious spheres by issuing repeated summons, closing of religious institutions like the Islamic Enlightenment Society and blocking Shia worshipers from attending Friday prayers.
Sonia Sarkar is a journalist based in India. She writes on conflict, religion, politics, health and gender rights from Southeast Asia. Her work has appeared in a range of international publications, including the South China Morning Post, Nikkei Asia and Al Jazeera.