Booboo, I don't know what age - as an example there is a girl who lives in our compound who is about 10 who appears in an abaya occasionally (usually acting very pleased with herself but that is slightly beside the point). Probably not as young as you see boys in dishdashas; but that doesn't seem to trouble you (even though it covers up just as much).
I said in one of my earlier posts, I think there is pressure to wear national dress (on both genders) but it is tied up with national pride as much as with religion. This is not Afghanistan. Or Morocco. It isn't even KSA. Nobody is going to stone you for not wearing an abaya. One of the wives of the Ruler of Dubai/Prime Minister of the UAE, doesn't wear the abaya - she is a Jordanian princess and chooses to wear western clothes.
If you are 'covering' for reasons of modesty you are not really supposed to bling up your clothes, carry designer handbags and wear full (and immaculate) make up, are you? I have an Emirati colleague who admitted that her parents asked her and her sisters to wear the abaya because the neighbours were gossiping. She doesn't particularly bling hers up; and she walks around the office with it open sometimes, with her hair loose and uncovered (and it is a mixed office) - whereas another Emirati I know panicked when a window cleaner appeared outside the pilates class, and grabbed her abaya, as she was uncomfortable with an unknown man seeing her in fairly skimpy (pilates/yoga style) clothes. Not because anyone was going to hassle her because of it; nobody would know, but because she didn't like it - her reaction was very much what mine was when a window cleaner appeared outside the window of the bit of the office (back of a file store!) where I was breastpumping! the windows in both cases are actually pretty much impossible to see through from the outside, but it's hard to convince yourself of that when there's someone right on the other side of them.
The abaya is also a bit of a statement. This is an intensely hierarchical society (not a good thing) and Emiratis are at the top of the tree, followed by some expat Arabs (mostly other Gulf nationals), then Western expats, then other expat Arabs, then expats from other places. There is a bit of an assumption therefore that someone wearing the local dress is not to be messed with; I am convinced that some of the non-locals who wear abayas (or dishdashas) do so for that reason. So in general its perception here is pretty different from its perception in the UK.
And there are feminist issues here, of course there are. One of the current initiatives (sorry not sure if it's just a proposal or has come into effect) is to allow Emirati mothers to give their children their citizenship - previously, this could only transfer through the father, so Emirati women married to eg Palestinian men could end up with effectively stateless children, particularly if the man buggered off and didn't help on the passport front. And they are still a minority in senior positions (not sure where that isn't the case). But this really isn't one of the things they are oppressed by, not unless you consider their husbands and brothers oppressed by the same expectations with regard to their own national dress.
Anyway, I had to go to the mall earlier, so I went in to ELC to look for this house. It was there, with a table and little brown chairs outside, and the dad and the mum were having cakes together :)
(incidentally it is really really odd hearing people say the white figures would be dad and mum.... like hearing someone insist that the pink-clad baby is a boy! have been here too long!)