Case Study Saudi Arabia.pdf

Saudi Arabia Noof Hassan is a 32 year old Saudi woman with thick brown hair, caramel skin, and merry, almond-shaped The Changing Face of Saudi eyes. The apartment she shares with her husband, Sami, and their two small sons takes up one floor of a Women three-stor...

Saudi Arabia Noof Hassan is a 32 year old Saudi woman with thick brown hair, caramel skin, and merry, almond-shaped The Changing Face of Saudi eyes. The apartment she shares with her husband, Sami, and their two small sons takes up one floor of a Women three-story building in a crowded neighborhood of Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia. Two years ago, the ~Case Study # 1-Page 1~ first time I met her, she was a manager in a food-processing factory, overseeing a dozen workers in an experimental all-female wing that was part of a nationwide campaign to draw Saudi women into paying jobs. The women Noof supervises work in an area off-limits to men, but this company’s managerial offices are “mixed,” as the Saudis say: men and women, unrelated by blood or marriage, in close proximity every day- Addressing each other with more than formal courtesies. Attending meetings at the same conference table and maybe poring side by side over the same document. Saudi Arabia is the most profoundly gender-segregated nation on Earth, and amid the fraught, fragile, POWER BRUNCH, SAUDI VERSION Aljazi Alrakan (standing), extraordinary changes under way in the daily lives of the kingdom’s women—multiple generations, pushed a dentist and self-described lifestyle blogger, joins friends in a by new labor policies and the encouragements of the late King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz, are now debating fashionable Riyadh restaurant. Medicine and teaching were careers what it means to be both truly modern and truly Saudi—this matter of mixing remains very controversial open to Saudi women early on; both suited a single-sex clientele. With more women than men now in universities, “there are new indeed. There are women here who won’t even consider a job that requires it. careers,” Alrakan says. “I look at girls in their early 20s, and I think, There are women who might consider such a job but are overruled by their parents, or their husbands, or They carry themselves more confidently.” worried relatives saying, no, not you; other Muslim countries may permit such a thing, but in Saudi Arabia this is not what decent women do. There are women at the opposite end of the spectrum too, quite at ease with male colleagues—in the past decade, government scholarship programs have sent tens of thousands of Saudi women to study abroad, and they’re coming home, many impatient to push the pace of change. Somewhere along that complicated spectrum, improvising to suit her own ideas about dignity, Noof has established her personal requirements inside the company offices: no physical contact with men, please, SEPARATION IS EVERYWHERE, EVEN IN LINE Food outlets, no matter how incidental. “The lady who is training me understands,” Noof said. “ This is religion. I can’t like this café in Riyadh, must follow unique Saudi laws: All lines, touch a man who is not my father, my uncle, my brother. That’s why.’” counters, and eating areas are divided to keep unrelated men and Sami, Noof’s husband, was about to drive us to the mall so Noof could help me pick out a new black women apart, although customers sometimes ignore the signs. Saudi abaya, the ankle-length covering garment women must wear in Saudi Arabia. Abayas in colors are starting authorities insist, to an extent unmatched in any other Muslim country, that Islam demands this separation in public and that these rules keep to proliferate in Jeddah, the less conservative port city in the west, but in Riyadh a nonblack abaya worn in All sorts of practical matters, including the physical layout of buildings, are arranged in deference to mandates that Saudi women be segregated from men. When King The Changing Face of Saudi Abdullah declared in 2011 that he would begin appointing women to the royal Women advisory council, the Shura, the ensuing national clamor—outrage from conservatives, elation from women’s advocates—included serious questions as to ~Case Study # 1-Page 2~ how these women could properly be seated. Should they be given separate chambers, with video links to their colleagues? Almost all Saudi schools are single sex, including faculty, and video is how some colleges handle lectures by professors of the wrong gender. Even the “jobs feminization” campaign to encourage Saudi women to join the labor force, a five-year-old initiative also ordered and championed by Abdullah before his death last year, has come with elaborate segregation rules. After decades of an GLAMOUR FINDS ITS OWN DISPLAY In the comfort of informal prohibition on women taking jobs that might place them in contact with no-men-allowed settings, like this fashion show put on by an Italian men, certain kinds of retail stores have been ordered to hire female clerks, and the stylist in a Riyadh store, Saudi women of means explore different government is offering incentives for putting Saudi women on the payroll. The female styles. A woman’s new party dress and eye makeup might be seen only supermarket cashiers, though, are grouped away from the male cashiers. Brand-new by her husband and female friends; for those who can afford these interior walls snake through department stores, separating male from female clerks. things, they’re enticing nonetheless. In Saudi Arabia, the religion of Islam dictates the separation of men and women and the laws of the country support the separation. The Saudi government in the 1980’s, enlisted religious police in a kingdom-wide crackdown that imposed upon all Saudis the rigidity of its most conservative culture. School curriculum was revamped. Music was silenced as un-Islamic. Couples walking or driving in public together were forced to show police their marriage licenses… The first time in nearly a half century that INVISIBLE WALLS ARE EFFECTIVE TOO With new policies bringing Saudi men voted was in 2005, and the only elected offices are municipal council seats, women into some sales jobs, the Families Only sign in this Riyadh mall store tells positions of no authority. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is not a constitutional a lone male shopper he can’t come in. For men unaccompanied by wives or monarchy. There’s no separate prime minister, no parliament. Absolute control children, close contact with female clerks is still unacceptable in much of Saudi Arabia. Detailed rules specify which products must be sold by which gender: no remains in the hands of the Al Sauds, the now enormous family for whom the nation