A Saudi businesswoman speaks on her mobile during the Private Sector Middle East Conference in Riyadh on December 3, 2013. (FAYEZ NURELDINE/AFP/Getty Images)[/caption]
Shortly before leaving Saudi Arabia after nearly four years as US ambassador there, James Smith made a final tour of the country. When he got back to the US, he shared his observations of the country. In Najran, he met a man who was nearly 100 years old and who had driven the first motor vehicle into that town, much to the consternation of the local citizens, who didn’t know what it was. He saw mango orchards in Jizan, and watched an apricot harvest up north in Al-Jouf. He visited the Nabatean ruins at Madain Saleh, near the Jordanian border. And in Qasim, in the heart of the conservative Najd, he toured a chicken-processing plant in which the entire staff is female.
The plant is part of the vast business empire of the Al-Zamil family, one of the most respected and progressive in Saudi Arabia. As an example of how business leaders like the Al-Zamils can lead the Kingdom toward modernization while maintaining the country’s traditions, Smith told the story of a man who approached the plant’s staff as it was nearing completion and said two of his daughters wanted jobs. The man volunteered to drive the young women to and from work if they were hired, because of course they would not be allowed to drive themselves.
When they were hired, Abdul Rahman Al-Zamil called their father, according to Smith, and he said: “‘If you are going to drop them off and pick them up, why don’t I hire you as well and you can do a taxi service during the day.’ So he did, and he had three members of the family with a job. All of this went very well until about three months later, when the man called Zamil again and said there are thirty other women in our village who want to work. So Zamil bought him a coaster bus so he could drive the women of the village to the processing plant. Now, of course, this guy couldn’t be alone with all these women so they hired his wife as the chaperone. The net impact of all of this is that there is a village of women who had never before had jobs but are now fully employed, but it had to be done the Saudi way.”
Smith told this as a good news story, and that’s one way to look at it, but it is also a reflection of the absurd gender-separation rules that hinder economic development and the employment of women all across Saudi Arabia. Unlike the other GCC countries, Saudi Arabia insists on maintaining separate workspaces for men and women. The tradition may be worthy of respect, but it also inhibits the economic growth the kingdom is supposedly trying to encourage. Private investors are in business to make money, not to promote outdated social attitudes. It is economically undesirable to have separate-but-equal workspaces for men and women, or to hire fleets of vans to transport women to work.
There are a few enterprises in which it makes sense to have an all-female staff. There is a hotel in Riyadh in which everyone—guests, staff, kitchen and cleaning workers—is female. Shops that sell goods intended exclusively for women, such as lingerie and cosmetics, have been all-female since the Saudi government issued a decree last year ordering the male sales clerks who had worked there previously be replaced by women. Banks have separate areas staffed exclusively by women for female customers. A case could be made for that, because those customers bring in gender-neutral money. But this arrangement makes no economic sense in an industrial enterprise such as the all-female “industrial city” planned for Hofuf—or a chicken processing plant.
The Al-Zamils may well be public spirited citizens willing to absorb extra costs to promote what they see as a desirable social goal: more jobs for women. But they can afford it. Other investors, including a new generation of Saudi entrepreneurs developing start-up companies, are unlikely to be so generous.
More than half the graduates of Saudi universities nowadays are women. In official planning documents, Saudi Arabia has recognized that it cannot afford to educate all those women and get no productive economic activity in return. Increasingly, the women will have to work, and many of them are eager to do so. They can’t all become teachers; the kingdom already has a glut of teachers. They will need to find jobs with private-sector employers. That is beginning to happen in small increments—a few women work as retail check-out clerks now, for example, and quite a few have become journalists in gender-integrated news organizations—but as long as Saudi society clings to its outdated rules banning gender mixing in most work places, it will be undermining its own economic plans.
All views expressed in this blog post are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, The Majalla magazine.
