More Saudi women join the workforce, but limits remain strict

They are challenging sex segregation, taking jobs in education, medicine, and banking.

from the April 24, 2007 edition

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When she received a scholarship for her PhD in Britain, her husband quit his job in Saudi Arabia so he could be the male relative that accompanied her abroad. He effectively became a househusband for a year to look after their sons.

"If you don't have your husband behind you, it's hard to get anything accomplished. It's still a problem. A lot of Saudi men wouldn't do anything for their wives," she says.

But Ms. Hazzaa, who favors a full niqab – the veil that covers everything but a woman's eyes – when in public, says that many of the issues that are focused on in the West – women driving, for instance – aren't important to her. She's frustrated at critics from outside the country.

"Sometimes I just want to say to them, 'We are happy with our position. We aren't victims.' We are a very young country, and I feel like what we're achieving now is like leap-frogging."

In many cases, she says, sex segregation should be maintained – in schools and universities, for instance. "I know that if things were a little easier maybe I could have accomplished double – but it's not just here. In the [United] States, women have to work twice as hard as men to get ahead, too."

To be sure, there are backward steps. Labor Minister Ghazi al-Ghusaibi issued a regulation last year requiring women, and not men, to work in lingerie shops. He couched the proposal in terms that would appeal to the religious hierarchy, arguing that salesmen holding up and discussing lacy undergarments with women was more likely to lead to sexual temptation than allowing women to work. But many Saudis say that his ultimate intention was to open up most retail jobs to women.

"The clerics knew this was the thin end of the wedge and defeated him," says one Saudi businessman in Riyadh, the capital. "They know that all these symbolic issues – women driving, working with men – will erode the foundations of their control." The Saudi Grand Mufti Abdul Aziz al-Ashaikh described allowing women to work as leading to "hellfire" and Mr. Ghusaibi received a personal death threat from Osama bin Laden for his trouble.

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