A heavy metal door guards the entrance to the women’s section of the Nardeen lighting company in Riyadh. To gain admittance, you press the bell and wait. In my case it is a long wait because the arrival of a male visitor brings production to a halt inside the factory while the workforce of 30 women shroud their faces in black. Eventually I am allowed in, only to hear a scream from one woman who is still wrestling to pull her abaya over an orange-coloured dress. I turn my back to await the all-clear.
Working from 7am to 3pm with a lunch break and a prayer break, the women assemble 2 800 fluorescent light fittings every day. Once an hour a loud bell rings, signalling they must cover themselves because a man is coming to collect their finished work.
The women’s section at the Nardeen factory, which opened last April, is a sign of changing times in Saudi Arabia. It is one of half a dozen projects sponsored by a charity to provide women with jobs in a man-free environment.
It may look a bit like a sweatshop but the women here seem happy enough. They are paid the same rates as men and earn £300 a month, plus bonuses if they exceed the daily production quota.
While the factory satisfies the kingdom’s traditionalists on one count — keeping the sexes apart — the very idea of women going out to work is still controversial. Even among Saudi women themselves, as many as 39%, according to one survey, still believe their rightful place is at home. For other women, though, the big question is not the supply of jobs but how to get to work if they take one — in this most traditional of Arab states, women are still forbidden, by custom, if not specifically by law, to drive.
With Riyadh’s scarce buses considered unsuitable for women some rely on male family members to drive them to work. Others, like Hindi al-Tuwajri, divorced and with three children, pay a driver 400 riyals a month — 20% of her total income — to take her to the factory each day, a 20-minute journey.
Gradually, Saudis are beginning to realise that the exclusion of women from meaningful activity outside the home just to preserve old desert traditions is a waste of talent. More than half the kingdom’s university graduates are female and yet women account for only about 5% of the workforce.
Although women still cannot vote or drive, the past few years have brought important changes, even if they stop short of equality. Women can now officially exist in their own right with their own identity cards, rather than being included on the card of their husband or father. Travel restrictions have been eased, allowing them to get blanket permission from a male relative for travel abroad, rather than needing separate permission for each trip. They can also own businesses instead of having to register them in the name of a wakil, an authorised male representative.
Lilac al-Safadi exemplifies the new breed of Saudi businesswomen. From her office on the 25th floor of the Kingdom Tower in Riyadh, she runs a business consultancy, which she started a year ago.
”Women getting into business is not something new, but now there is a boom,” says Safadi, who did postgraduate studies in IT and business in Australia. ”The government is encouraging people big-time. They are trying to be much easier on the logistics and encouraging the private sector to open women’s sections.”
Besides owning 60% of company shares in the kingdom, Saudi women collectively have $25-billion in bank accounts — money that could be invested in new businesses.
In the meantime, though, they face serious obstacles, not least the lack of a suitable workforce. Among the small numbers of women who do work, 70% are in education and medicine — the two main ”suitable” fields for women. Less than 1% go into business.
Journalism is one area in which Saudi women are well established. Sabria Jawhar introduces herself with a business card saying she is ”head of the ladies’ department” at the Saudi Gazette in Jeddah. Jawhar has an MA in applied linguistics and speaks perfect English. With only her eyes visible, it’s hard to tell her age but she seems young and a pair of faded blue jeans show beneath her abaya when she sits.
How difficult is it for a Saudi woman to get into journalism? That is not really the problem, she says. ”Women here are scared. They are just reluctant to get into that field because of some social conceptions about the job.” Some women have worked in journalism for years, ”but all they write about is women’s issues, children and family affairs. They don’t want to get into covering areas like politics or terrorism. I am the only Saudi female who is covering terrorism. I go to the field and I cover these things. So there is a change. The government never stopped us. It’s us. The barrier is inside the women.”
The newspaper office has an area reserved for women, though they can choose whether or not to use it. ”It’s just that when we work … for somebody like me, because I’m veiled, I’d rather work in a separate place where I can take off my veil. It’s my choice. Four female editors work upstairs with guys in the same office, and they are not veiled. That’s their choice. Here in Jeddah it’s more flexible than it is in Riyadh.”
Dress codes and their local variations are determined more by tradition than written laws. Women who are considered not to be properly dressed face harassment — in general, this means covering the face as well as the hair.
The social complexities of women working and doing business arise from one basic idea: that men are uncontrollably attracted to women and that women are natural temptresses, even if they try not to be. The Saudi solution is to keep them apart as much as possible unless they are related by blood or marriage. Whatever the official line, though, a younger generation is increasingly finding ways around this.
”Whether it’s affairs, whether it’s dating, it’s out there in the open,” says Somayya Jabarti, one of 10 women working at Arab News. ”Here in Jeddah, I go to coffee shops and I see openly girls and boys, and they’re dating.”
Coffee shops and restaurants are curtained off into sections, with separate entrances for ”singles” (that is, single men) and families. Sometimes there’s also a women-only section. The family section is where people do their dating. ”We always make jokes that having such a system where your table is surrounded by partitions or curtains — if someone wants to have a date or something, it’s perfect privacy,” Jabarti says.
The kingdom’s sexual apartheid is enforced, in a crude fashion, by the religious police, the mutawa. Thuggish, bigoted and with little real training in Islamic law, they are feared in some areas but also increasingly ridiculed. In Jeddah, they are rarely seen nowadays.
The mutawa, who don’t wear uniform, ran into trouble in Riyadh in December. Two of them tailed a man and his wife back to their home, suspecting they were unmarried. The man, who thought they were trying to kidnap his wife, says they attacked him as he stepped out of his car and then pursued his wife as she ran to a neighbour’s flat screaming for help.
And despite strenuous efforts to prevent any activity that might conceivably lead to immorality, the result is far from a model society. Neither men nor women have much opportunity to learn how they might interact with one another in non-sexual ways, which can lead to serious problems. In Riyadh last year, two girls were molested by four teenage youths, who made a video clip of the attack on a cellphone, then circulated it to friends. Reportedly there are dozens of similar phone videos in circulation.
An article in al-Watan newspaper recently urged Saudi parents to think twice before sending their sons to study in the United States because of their unfamiliarity with American customs. Americans expect people to observe traffic laws, it explained; they also disapprove of bribery and lying to officials and the women are liable to complain if sexually harassed.
So perhaps it’s scarcely surprising that many Saudi women feel more comfortable in segregated areas where they can relax and take their abayas off. It’s clear, though, that the present system cannot survive indefinitely and the government is trying to steer a middle course by taking small, cautious steps to please the women’s rights activists while trying not to provoke too much opposition from the traditionalists. It balked at letting women vote in the local government elections early last year, but in December did nothing to stop Jeddah’s Chamber of Commerce holding the first mixed elections for its board — in which women won two of the 12 seats. In 2000 Saudi Arabia signed the international Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women — but it added a rider claiming the right to ignore any part of the treaty that conflicts with ”the norms of Islamic law”.
The real conflict, though, is not with Islamic law but the ”pre-Islamic patriarchal culture”, according to Faten Abbar, who works for the International Organisation for Woman and Family in Jeddah. ”The thing with Islam that’s tricky is interpretation — and it’s always male interpretation, so a lot of it comes from a very male perspective.
”If you study Islam you will find verses that grant women economic equality and chances for employment … In the days of the Prophet the women and men used to sit and learn together. So why is it that today we have to be segregated? Islam definitely provides these rights but states don’t ensure the implementation.”
Nobody disputes that the women pressing for rights are a tiny minority, but they are vociferous and come almost entirely from the kingdom’s Western-educated elite, which makes them difficult to ignore. Often, they are supported by men from the liberal elite.
Two friends, Mr A and Mrs B, are sitting side by side on a sofa in the foyer of a Riyadh hotel as we chat about life in Saudi Arabia. They are not married to each other and so, strictly speaking, should not be together in public. Nobody in the hotel seems to mind, but it would be unwise to mention their names, just in case.
Our conversation turns to the subject of parties. ”Saudis love to celebrate,” Mrs B says. ”We party big-time.”
Men and women, of course, do their partying separately. Men’s parties tend to be dull affairs, Mr A grumbles. Women’s parties are a different matter, and often carry on until 4am with dancing and female DJs.
And one of the ironies of Saudi Arabia’s sexual apartheid is that women’s parties are a no-go area for the mutawa. They can’t raid a women’s party unless they suspect alcohol is present — and they are in serious trouble if their suspicions turn out to be wrong.
”In that area, women have more freedom,” Mrs B says. Later, Mr A suggests the partying is what holds Saudi women back. ”They have too much fun,” he says, though he wouldn’t dare say it in Mrs B’s hearing. ”I think that’s why they don’t complain more.” — Â