ABU DHABI, (Pakistan Point News - 10th Dec, 2025) Abu Dhabi Finance Week (ADFW) hosted a prominent event on Tuesday, organised by PGIM under the theme “Women Shape Culture and Capital,” exploring the rising influence of inclusive growth and cultural capital in reshaping global finance, and how Abu Dhabi is driving this transformation through a long-term economic and human-centred vision.
The keynote address was delivered by H.H. Sheikha Dr. Shamma Mohammed Khalid Al Nahyan, followed by a panel featuring Aisha Al Mansouri, Caroline Wini from PFI and Dr. Vicki Walia, moderated by Imira Socorro of PGIM.
Sheikha Shamma opened with a striking question — “Is capital male or female?” — before emphasising that capital is neutral and its impact depends on how it is directed. She said the term “women’s empowerment” no longer reflects current economic realities, noting that women today are not seeking a seat at the table but “have become the table upon which the new economy is built.”
She said the traditional financial model, characterised by competition and unilateral decision-making, is no longer suited to a complex world. The modern economy, she argued, requires more inclusive and adaptive systems, reflected in the qualities of female leadership. The future financial system, she added, “needs feminine intelligence to survive.”
Sheikha Shamma highlighted the emergence of an “economy of meaning” in which money carries identity, value and community. Women, she said, bring a unique capacity to merge material and cultural capital, connect strategy with emotion and combine analysis with intuition, describing intuition as “the highest degree of data processing,” and an area beyond the reach of artificial intelligence.
She praised Abu Dhabi’s approach to building a balanced economy that pairs resilience with empathy and combines long-term vision with sustainability. Effective leadership today, she said, is measured by its ability to include rather than control, and to create deep impact rather than simply generate numbers. Women in multicultural workplaces, she added, play a central role in interpreting contexts and transforming differences into “creative energy,” describing them as “engineers of chaos reorganisation.”
She said emotional intelligence has become “a Currency that does not lose value against artificial intelligence,” arguing that machines can calculate risks but cannot sense them, and can manage portfolios but not relationships. She launched an interactive question on the challenges women face in financial leadership, calling on attendees not to wait for permission but to claim authority through competence, innovation and the courage to stand out.
Sheikha Shamma said women in Abu Dhabi today have “the pen, the paper, the support and the will to write the future of the economy.” Their contribution, she added, is not about competition but about completing an economic picture that remained unfinished for centuries.
Returning to her opening question, she said, “Capital is neutral. But the value of money is determined by the one who holds it.” She added, “When a man holds money, he often builds a tower; when a woman holds money, she often builds a bridge. Today, we need the bridges that connect the components of the world — bridges that connect the towers.”
