Supporting Emirati females leadership skills through teaching them how to debate: Design, assessment, and considerations

• Presented a critical account of the women status in the Middle East in general and the United Arab Emirates in particular.
• Stressed the role of leadership education for women empowerment in under development countries such as the UAE.
• Proposed the debate as a self-transformational learning tool.
• Measured the impact of debate teaching in two main aspects: leadership self-efficacy, and persuasive communication.
• Discussed the implications of debate teaching for women empowerment and sense of leadership.

In response to the emerging need in the United Arab Emirates to empower young women and prepare them for future leadership tasks, a debate teaching intervention was organized in two phases at a public University in Dubai. During that intervention, 137 female Emirati students were taught the basics of debate and then participated in a debate session on a topic of general interest (Dubai EXPO 2020). Results show that participants observe a clear change in how they perceive themselves as leaders as a result of the intervention. Moreover, their leadership discourse as measured in terms of the persuasiveness of their expressed arguments at a group level was seen to improve more when the debate format followed had a formal structure than when it was flexible. Implications are discussed regarding the transformative learning function of debate as a training tool and its effect on leadership self-efficacy.