Saudi Arabia: women face unemployment and complex choices - Reports from around the world: Middle East and Africa

WIN News, Summer, 2003

FROM 'NEWSHEET', SHIRKAT GAH, WOMEN'S RESOURCE CENTRE P.O. Box 5192, Lahore, PAKISTAN

"Saudi women eager for higher education and a window on the world have an ally at the center of power in the conservative kingdom. In a festive hall at the royal palace, Princess al-Jouhara bint Ibrahim al-Ibrahim, the wife of King Fahd, hosts a reception to discuss women's needs at King Saud University, the largest and oldest of eight in Saudi Arabia.

Surrounded by more than 100 lecturers or professors, all of them women, the princess listens quietly as her guests outline how her grants of 42 million riyals ($11.2 million) have been spent or allocated at the Riyadh-based university ...

Princess al-Jouhara, the recipient of an honorary doctorate, has frequently urged Saudi women in private gatherings and at graduation ceremonies to take advantage of the higher education programs that were not available in her youth. (Editor's Note: But as the UNDP Development Report, published last autumn-see WIN NEWS-, the sciences, engineering, biology and research subjects are excluded from all university curricula in Saudi Arabia and the Middle East.)

Women in the kingdom must wear a veil in public, may not drive and need a male relative as chaperone when they go out ... Trying to balance the challenges of modernity with the demands of traditional past means that change is cautious and slow, but women insist that change is afoot ... The government, recently, introduced a national education program for girls giving religious leaders assurances it would have a solid religious component and giving them direct supervision.

Earlier this year, the ministry of education took over the supervision of girls' education after a devastating school fire killed 15 female students. (Editor's Note: As reported around the world-also by WIN NEWS--15 girls died and many more were injured because the Saudi religious police prevented the fire brigade from rescuing the girls from the burning building because the girl students did not wear headscarfs- as required by the religious police and enforced by the Saudi government--so the girls burned.)

Saudi women now outstrip men as graduates of universities and other specialized colleges, making up 58 percent of a total of nearly 32,000 students in 2000. Female students have separate facilities from their male counterparts and listen to male instructors via a closed circuit video and audio system ... Many Saudi women are annoyed that Western observers often preach about the shortcomings of the kingdom and focus on issues such as sexual Segregation, but fail to see the issues that women themselves find far more frustrating than veiling and a prohibition against driving. The Saudi English-language daily Arab News, said Saudi women were more concerned about finding good work in a tough job market than being veiled ...

Only six percent of women in the overall population are categorized as workers, many absorbed into teaching, nursing, medicine or charity work. Although many women do not work from choice, there are also restrictions on their participation in various professions. In some cases, the constraints on women are not enshrined in law, but in practice. For example, there are no programs to teach women engineering or law in Saudi Arabia--unlike other Arab countries.

Similarly, although women own 40 percent of private wealth and thousands of businesses from retail to heavy industry, they face frustrating cultural and legal restraints. Women must rely on male agents to deal with government offices and conduct many business transactions.

Many say traditon and culture, not Islam, support these restrictions, ... Islam assures women sole control of their inheritance and grants them property rights. (Editor's Note: According to the Muslim religion, women inherit only half of what men inherit.)

The issue of allowing more access to jobs for women is soon overwhelmed in any discussion of unemployment in the kingdom by the growing pressure to find jobs for Saudi males. The onus on men to work rather than women is high in this traditional society where unemployment among is conservatively estimated at 12 percent and growing The average age for the 16.2 million Saudis in the Kingdom in 2000 was 16, making the issue of job creation all the more pressing in the short to medium term.

This also makes the drive to replace the five to six million resident foreigners with Saudis a hot topic ...

Back at the palace reception, one woman present still had at least one idea about how Saudi women would fit into this drive for 'Saudization.' Nursing, that's really where there are jobs for Saudi women in the hospitals to replace the expatriates, adding that one of the achievement prizes endowed by Princess al-Jouhara was promoting competition in nursing courses."