A study by MasterCard is hardly a quality or accurate one. A couple of comments:

1) Women must be given credit for how large a company they run. A woman running a business worth BD100,000 is obviously not on par with another leading an investment firm worth BD70 million, for example. Does this study factor this into account? If so, other GCC women would obviously be given credit for multi-million dollar businesses they run.

2) Why isn't the URL to this study released for us to read? I found the statistics a bit odd that Bahrain leads the way for women ahead of other GCC countries, Egypt and Lebanon! I Googled and found nothing on Bahrain is mentioned!! MasterCard says the report is published on http://www.masterintelligence.com/index.jsp. I opened the site and it turns out that the last report published on women's empowerment (covering the GCC) was in 2011, and guess what? Bahrain wasn't even part of this study/survey! The report covered all GCC countries except Oman and Bahrain. RAH