Dr. Jihene Chebbi Ghannay (she/her) is a Grants and Compliance Officer at Georgetown University in Qatar where she also serves as IRB Coordinator. Her work spans every stage of the research lifecycle—from grants administration and research ethics to human-subjects protection and IRB review—supporting faculty, researchers and students. She holds a Ph.D. in Management Sciences from the University of Manouba, Tunisia and brings more than twenty years of experience across higher education, public administration, organizational management, finance and research administration in Qatar and Tunisia. Her research interests center on competitive intelligence and organizational culture with a particular focus on institutional inclusion and gendered workplace experiences. Her work has been presented at conferences and published in peer-reviewed journals. Across her research and administrative roles, she is committed to conducting research inclusively and translating its findings into policies and practices that make institutions more equitable.
Project: Visible Identities, Invisible Barriers: The Inclusion Gap and Professional Visibility Among Hijab-Wearing Women in the Middle East
Many multinational organizations now place diversity, equity and inclusion at the center of their commitments. For visibly religious women, barriers do not necessarily disappear once they enter the workplace. This project examines how hijab-wearing women navigate professional visibility, institutional inclusion and career mobility within multinational corporations, universities and other professional institutions across the Middle East. At the center of the study is what I call the ” inclusion gap”—the distance between what organizations say about equity and what women experience in their day-to-day working lives, including workplace culture, recognition, promotion and access to client-facing roles. The core question is whether wearing the hijab shapes access to roles and positions of authority even within institutions that describe themselves as inclusive. The project uses a comparative approach based on approximately 18 semi-structured interviews with hijab-wearing Muslim women working across several professional sectors. Participants will be recruited through purposive and snowball sampling. The interviews will be analyzed thematically. Drawing on feminist theory and organizational sociology the analysis will examine how gender and visible religious identity interact with ethnicity, race, social class, occupational sector and institutional culture to produce different experiences of constraint and opportunity. Much existing research focuses on hiring decisions. This project follows women’s experiences beyond recruitment asking who gets seen, heard, promoted and recognized as a leader once women are inside these institutions. The findings will contribute to scholarship on gendered professionalism, workplace inclusion and organizational power. I plan to develop them into a conference presentation and a publishable paper with implications for more equitable policies, on visibility, promotion and leadership.