UK Press Features

What Saudi women want

The Times – May 19, 2004

Pretty, witty, glossy and groomed, Samia laughs as she remembers her first professional mistake. “When I finished my degree in political science and economics at the American University, I went home to get a job, and told my father I wanted to work in the diplomatic corps,” she recalls ruefully. “He was a personal friend of the foreign minister of the day, so he took my papers round to the ministry for me. But all the minister said was: ‘Are you crazy? There are no women working here.’ ‘Well, it was worth a try!’ my father said. And that was the end of that.”

It was 1973, and the home that Samia Ali al-Edrisi was returning to was Saudi Arabia: an austerely religious desert kingdom whose meek, muffled Muslim women were seldom seen, never heard and certainly not employed. Her father, a businessman, had had the vision to have her educated in more liberal Egypt at a time when Saudi Arabia still had no schools for girls (the first opened in 1962). But what good would book-learning and ambition do her now she was back in the land of the veil?

Plenty, as it turned out. That year, 1973, was also the year when Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil producer, discovered its economic muscle by cutting off supplies to an America that it blamed for Israeli military advances, and doubling prices to other countries. One result was that Saudi Arabia became fabulously rich. Another was that Samia found herself being offered one of the first four jobs for women at the newly nationalized Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco). She never looked back.

Today Samia, one of more than a dozen businesswomen visiting London for a conference promoting trade ties with her homeland, can boast three decades on the front line of the fight for female empowerment.

There are plenty of advances to celebrate. The Saudi Government has ploughed some of its billions back into educating its workforce. Many thousands, both men and women, from both rich and poor backgrounds, have studied abroad (with women often following their husbands to college overseas and winning their own government scholarships from there). One generation on, there are girls’ schools everywhere and more female than male students in Saudi universities. And Samia’s 22-year-old daughter, now working at Saudi Aramco, is part of an internet-connected army of 1,000 female employees.

With her designer suit, floaty scarf, manicured hands and chatty charm, Samia makes achievement look effortless. But it’s not. Back home, even though more Saudi women work, they do so mostly in segregated women’s units within male offices. They still can’t talk direcftly to male government officials (they must use a hired male proxy) or get a business sloan from a bank – which is perhaps unsurprising, since they’re not even allowed to drive. Other rights that we take for granted in the West – voting, going to the cinema, even listening to music in public places – remain beyond the reach of Saudi women and men alike. Now the rising expectations of the fast-growing educated middle class are being further undercut by a population explosion, worsening unemployment, falling wages and a surge in violent Islamic radicalism, even as the 10,000-odd princes of the House of Saud are finally making more concerted efforts to reform. It’s an explosive mix. “I have to be honest, it’s not all wonderful,” Samia says. “There’s a lot of frustration about a lot of things today, especially for women. But if I work hard I get rewards. Not everything that I want. But enough to relieve some of the frustration.”

Samia’s own career shows both the growing potential for working women and the obstacles that Saudi society puts in their way. She rose from being a translator for the Aramco office that dealt with the Government to setting up clerical and computer training programmes for 80 women, to becoming the adviser to the vice-president for public affairs, working on company-wide budgeting, planning and human resources projects. Unusually, she was the direct boss of many young men from the villages. After an uncomfortable, tongue-tied few weeks refusing to meet her eye (“It’s not in the culture; it’s rude to stare at a woman who’s not your female relative”) they learned professional respect. For 22 years she was known politely as “Mother of Majed,” the name of her first son – a form of address she found no less impersonal than a Western woman does being called “Mrs Smith” after her husband’s surname.

But there were limits to how high the pioneering women of this experiment could climb. There was no chance that Samia could become a vice-presidetn herself. A post so high-ranking would involve too much contact with men. So she left six years ago, using her severance pay to set up a jewellery and fasoin business with another Saudi woman. “I felt I’d reached a glass ceiling,” she says. “It’s a very male-oriented company, because it’s an oil company. I don’t think that’s unique to Saudi Arabia. I was just sick and tired of making my male colleagues look good and going nowhere.”

How far Saudi women should be able to, or want to, progress professionally is something that even these high achievers don’t agree on.

Dr Awatif Alam, an associate professor of community medicine at King Sauid University in Riyadh, seized the opportunity to follow her husband to Canada and gain medical qualifications. But she says she was also happy to come home – where, with the extra domestic help offered by her extended family, she was able to add four new babies to the two born in the West (“in Canada, alone, I just didn’t have enough hands”). Rising at six to cook breakfast for her children, she now gets to her first lectures at eight, wearing modest Western dress and a tightly-wrapped headscarf, and is home by 3.30 to enjoy her 12-year-old son and his older siblings for the evening. Awatif is full of praise for her businessman husband, “a typical Saudi man who didn’t stop me getting educated because he knew my wishes” and sometimes even does the shopping. And she is firm with the young male postgraduates she teaches (Saudi Arabia’s elaborate code of modesty doesn’t prevent doctors from treating or teaching members of the opposite sex). “A minority from poor villages are a little discomfited to be faced with me, and you can see them thinking, ‘Why is a woman teaching me?’” she says. “But it only takes minutes for them to realize that I’m in charge. Anyone who wasn’t respectful would be told, ‘In and respectful, or out,’ but that has never happened. Her daughter, following her example, is training to be a doctor. The family has enough money to pay for domestic help and the driver she and her three daughters need to get to work, to school and, in her sporty 16-year-old’s case, to the gym. Awatif doesn’t mind that she can’t drive herself. Nor does she want to strive for the impossible – becoming the head of her hospital. “I can’t see that. I enjoy my job. I want to spend time with my children. I’m happy with my lot.”

Others want more. When in England, Samia drives a car – “I like the freedom of the road opening up ahead,” she says with relish – and she wants more reform, in more areas, faster. In her home town of Dahran, in the oil-producing Eastern Province, Samia has spent four years getting the local chamber of commerce to approve the existence of her 40-member businesswomen’s forum, so women can get official help setting up the small firms that are their way round the glass ceiling. And in Jeddah, the articulate Fatin Yusef Bundagji has gone a step further. Fatin has set up the first women’s department at the Jeddah chamber (there are 9,000 registered businesswomen in Jeddah and Riyadh alone). She now directs the chamber’s new Women’s Empowerment Programme. Sleek in a trouser suit and scarf – although she says she wears the flowing black abaya and headscarf at home “like a coat and hat here” – she rattles off a string of successes with initiatives, units, networking, outreach, lobbying and training.

Yet, however sharp their discontents, the businesswomen’s strategic patience is remarkable. All of them are positive about the way the government reforms now underway – among them the third instalment of the “national dialogue” that the House of Saud began after most of the perpetrators of the 9/11 attack on New York turned out to be Saudi. It will consist of a nationwide discussion next month of the rights and duties of Saudi women. They are positive too about reforms in the past, principally the five-year development plans begun by the Government in the 1970s. They are grateful for the opportunities to study that have been lavished on them. And their conversation is littered with cautious phrases like “slowly slowly”, “step by step” and “we need as a nation to make changes at our own pace, and within our own system of beliefs”. The life they describe is one in which change can be negotiated, carefully, quietly and consensually – if a bit bureaucratically – rather than the place of heavy-handed male authoritarianism viewed with suspicion in the West.

Afaf al-Hamdan, who runs the women’s section of Sagia, an organization attracting investment into Saudi Arabia, managed to buck the system in which women studying abroad need a male relative, or guardian, to protect them – and lived alone in the United States while she took a masters degree in education. “It took a fight to get there,” she says, “but it was beneficial. I enjoyed it.” Likewise, Fatin talks proudly about her gradual achievement getting women to participate in a business conference in Jeddah. One year, no women; the next year, women could listen from a balcony, behind a curtain; the following year they could ask the occasional question, through a microphone, from behind a glass partition; and last year women were allowed into the hall and even on to the panel, although still behind a glass partition. What comes next?

“ We’ve come a long way in Saudi Arabia,” Fatin says energetically. “Thirty years ago we had nothing – hardly any hospitals, schools or income. To take a country from basically nonexistent and make it into what it’s become today is moving so fast that it’s hard to keep up. The Government really wants to progress and make ours a world-class nation. The initiatives they’ve taken are major. Not the implementation – but that’s a problem of bureaucracy. Now it’s up to us.”

Despite all the difficulties, these women say they want to stay in Saudi Arabia and make it a place where they and their daughters can flourish. “I am the grandmother of a two-year-old girl,” Fatin says, in the middle of a list of Saudi women achievers – including one pilot and two under-ministers. “I want her to see our country as I do.” Worrying about whether the current instability would drive away foreign investment, and whether the overcrowded universities and job market would drive away her children, Samia says: “We cannot allow vandals to terrorise us and ruin the opportunities. I feel I’ve struggled to get where I am today, and I have two daughters, who are as determined as I am to do something, and we want to stay home. We don’t want to be forced to leave because it’s unstable or not the right environment. So we have to work to make it work.”

The upside of all the turmoil today is that a once lethargic country is now in a state of tumultuous discussion about the future. Reform really might now speed up. Crown Prince Abdullah has even tentatively promised the first elections – to some seats on municipal councils – later this year. Many women are hoping they will be allowed to vote. Some are even hoping that they may be allowed to run for office.

If Samia could, would she stand as a councillor? “Of course,” she answers, without a second’s hesitation. She twinkles. “And I think I’d win too.”

ENDS