Some years ago I went for a job as a business correspondent at a national newspaper in the United Kingdom.
Towards the end of the interview, the - male - editor asked me, "Do you think men and women read the business pages differently?"
I had never considered that before. Until then, I had worked at a newswire writing mainly corporate earnings stories. We always led the story with the net profit or loss and, well, the bottom line tends to be gender-neutral.
It's only since I arrived in the UAE and started writing about women business leaders that I realised how much women enjoy reading about successful businesswomen and how important they think the media are for promoting female role models who may encourage younger female colleagues to pursue high-flying careers or careers in industries that have tended to be male-dominated.
For while the country's leadership is considered supportive of women in the workplace - there was much excitement when the Government ruled in December that there must be a woman on every corporate board - there remain cultural and family restrictions, according to the female achievers I have interviewed here over the past six months.
But there is a sense of optimism in the Arabian Gulf region that contrasts perhaps to the general mood of gloom in the West, where women seem a little jaded these days about the struggle to break through the glass ceiling.
A case in point: the financial crisis may been blamed largely on men, but it also scuppered the careers of three women who were poised to take over leadership positions at big banks in the United States for the first time.
And so it's the hopeful words of Randa Bessiso, the managing director of Manchester Business School Middle East in Dubai, that I recall in particular among all the interviews I have done over the past six months.
"Almost all the conferences I've been to [argue] we need legislation to empower women," she said when we spoke last month.
"If we want to do it, we go ahead and do it - we don't wait for society to give us regulations to empower us. We set the example and make sure that it's visible to enough relatively young women to inspire them."
And that is why it is so important for women to feature on the business pages - not just on International Women's Day but on a regular basis.
