Saudi women are finding ways into the workplace
More take on new roles and gain a measure of financial independence.
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — When Sofana Dahlan wanted to study law, she had to go to Egypt to do it. The subject wasn’t offered to women at universities in her native Saudi Arabia.
Nearly 20 years later, she is an accomplished lawyer and entrepreneur who has helped launch the businesses of numerous artists, designers and other creative types.
Her career is evidence of as low but seismic shift inthe ultraconservative Muslim kingdom, which has long relegated women to the status of legal minors.
Although women still need the permission of a male relative to attend university, get married or travel abroad, some are taking on new roles in the workplace— and in the process, gaining a measure of financial independence. Women cloaked in black, some with only their eyes showing through face veils, are working in shops and cafes, offices and boardrooms, and even some factory assembly lines.
That this fact is not widely recognized outside Saudi Arabia is a source of some irritation to women like Dahlan, who has worked hard to build her business profile.
“No matter how successful we are, no matter how much we achieve, the world still chooses to see us as op--
pressed,” said Dahlan, who proudly wears the body- coveringabaya.“Andin reality, a lot of us are not. We have limitations, but the whole world has limitations to different degrees.”
Saudis attribute the changing attitudes about women in the work place to a number of factors, including the rising cost of living, improvements in women’s education, the influence of the Internet and social media, and the modernizing efforts of the late King Abdullah, who paid for tens of thousands of young people of both genders to study abroad each year.
“It just makes economic sense,” said Khalid Alkhudair, who founded the women’s recruitment agency Glo work after seeing his Western- educated sister struggle to find work.
Many couples, including Alkhudair and his wife, are finding that they need two incomes to afford the lifestyle they want. At the same time, companies are under pressure to hire Saudis to fill quotas demanded by the government before they can employ foreign workers to fill posts that locals are either not qualified for or consider too menial.
The so- called Saudization program, an attempt to reduce unemployment among the growing number of young Saudis entering the workforce, has opened doors to women in sectors that can accommodate the kingdom’s strict rules on gender segregation, said Steffen Hertog, an expert on labor reformat the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Companies are putting in partitions to create separate work spaces for women. Some offer transportation stipends for female employees, who are not allowed to drive. A few have entire manufacturing plants staffed by women. Others are experimenting with virtual offices, allowing women towork from home.
But progress has been slow. Although women make up more than half the kingdom’s university graduates, they account for just 13% of the positions held by Saudis in the government and private sectors, according to figures reported in the local press in February.
Saudization has also created what Hertog called “fake women’s employment,” in which companies pay them a small salary and tell them to stay home. “If you look at the statistics, there has been a huge boom in Saudi women’s employment in construction, which is ridiculous,” he said. A few may hold office jobs in construction companies; none appear to be on building sites.
The government’s job creation efforts took on greater urgency during the “Arab Spring” uprisings that swept the region in 2011, a movement driven in part by the frustration of idle youth.
A new benefit was introduced that paid job seekers the equivalent of $ 533 a month for a year. About 1.2 million of the 1.6 million people who registered were women, according to news reports.
Saudis typically look to the government for work. For women, that usually means jobs in schools and hospitals. But there aren’t enough of those to meet the demand. So the government has been easing restrictions and sponsoring training to help women enter the private sector.
Glo-work was one of the organizations tapped by the Ministry of Labor to help reduce the number of women on the unemployment rolls, receiving a commission for each new hire. Its recruiters conduct hundreds of interviews a week, matching job seekers with employers willing to hire women.
For many, it will be the first time that they interact with men outside their immediate families, and communication with their employers can be a problem.
“We have a lot of women leaving a company because the bathrooms are not clean,” Alkhudair said. The women are embarrassed to bring up the issue.
So the agency not only coaches the mon how to land a job, but also offers advice on how to conduct themselves in the work place.
Every time the agency places a woman in a job, a gong is rung and the entire office breaks out in applause. Since the agency opened its doors four years ago in an upscale tower in the capital, Riyadh, the gong has sounded thousands of times.
There has been resistance, however. When Glo-work advised one of its first clients, a local supermarket chain, to hire 11 female cashiers, there was a public outcry. A prominent cleric, Youssef Ahmed, called for a boycott of the stores, which he claimed were encouraging mingling between the sexes.
“They actually had to let go of these women because of the outcry,” Alkhudair said.
It took intensive lobbying, a social media campaign and a royal decree to open the doors to women in the retail sector — starting with lingerie and cosmetics stores.
That women had been forced tomake their most intimate purchases from men was a source of acute discomfort to many of them.
Although a law was passed in 2006 requiring that stores catering exclusively to women hire female attendants, it wasn’t enforced, said Reem Asaad, a financial advisor in the country’s commercial hub, Jidda.
After one particularly humiliating encounter, her patience snapped. Amale clerk screamed at her for scraping a sticker off a package of underwear so she could see what style itwas.
In retrospect, Asaad suspects the clerk was afraid of running afoul of the religious