In Taking Jobs, Women Take On a Saudi Taboo Today

In Taking Jobs, Women Take On a Saudi Taboo

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Instead, the irate caller accusing the store of anti-Islamic behavior was a frequent shopper, a woman who on average spent $13,000 per visit.

“Maybe I should get whale sounds,” said the princess, Reema Bint Bandar al-Saud, making light of the blowback that businesspeople in this intensely religious and conservative kingdom often face when making even glacial changes to How Things Are Done.

But this is part of being a pioneer in Saudi Arabia, where women are severely restricted in all public activities and are treated as the wards of their male relatives. Despite her royal credentials, the princess did away with the music but has pushed ahead on the equally touchy front of hiring women as salesclerks. This step — or leap, in the Saudi context — seeks to not only shift social conventions but also to aid the country’s long-term economic health.

At Harvey Nichols, several dozen female clerks were spread throughout the store on a recent visit, all cloaked in black, their hair covered, some with only their eyes peering through narrow slits in face veils. They were busy arranging dresses, hawking cosmetics and swiping credit cards.

Just two years ago there were only a few women working here.

The kingdom’s restrictions on women have long drawn the condemnation of rights groups, most recently after dozens of women drew headlines by defying a ban on driving.

But some women’s rights advocates here say that the international attention given to small numbers of women getting behind the wheel overshadows the deep, if gradual, shifts in Saudi society as more women work, broadening their range of experience, helping to run organizations and earning a degree of economic independence.

Although the effort has been promoted by the Ministry of Labor as part of a campaign to reduce unemployment and the dependence on foreign workers, it has butted up against strict social codes. The percentage of Saudi women who work remains minuscule by world standards, at about 15 percent.

Still, many employers say they prefer hiring Saudi women to Saudi men; they have added separate break rooms and office areas for women, and have installed partitions and cameras to prevent unwelcome mingling.

“We are promoting recruitment of Saudi women because they have a low level of attrition, a better attention to detail, a willingness to perform and a productivity about twice that of Saudi men,” said a grocery store manager with branches throughout the kingdom.

Despite that, Saudi women make up less than 5 percent of his staff of more than 1,000 because of social taboos in many areas. He spoke on the condition that neither he nor his company be identified to avoid being targeted by opponents of women’s employment.

While working women in the Red Sea city of Jidda are relatively accepted, he said, the addition of female checkout clerks in a more conservative city caused such an uproar that a local prince intervened and paid the women’s salaries for more than a year — as long as they stayed home.

Others have found business opportunities in bridging the gap between employers and women.

“For some employers, it is their first time to hire women, and they don’t know how to deal with them,” said Khalid Alkhudair, 30, who runs a women’s employment service called Glowork that cooperates with the government to increase female employment.

Frosted-glass partitions bearing inspirational quotes divide the company’s pink-walled office in Riyadh. On a recent morning, a dozen female employees sipped coffee as they sorted through applicants’ résumés on flat-screen monitors. All wore loose black gowns, some with their hair uncovered — a rare but increasingly common sight in some private offices.

In two years, the company has found jobs for more than 10,000 women, including one chief financial officer, several human resource managers and a group of women at a light bulb factory, Mr. Alkhudair said.

Yet across the kingdom, about two-thirds of female university graduates are unemployed, showing that the labor market has yet to catch up with huge advances in women’s education.

Some Saudis laud King Abdullah as a reformer for appointing 30 women to a royal advisory council and granting women the right to run and vote in municipal elections. Others blast the kingdom for falling behind the rest of the world by failing to appoint female judges, ambassadors and ministers and leaving in place “guardianship laws” that bar women from traveling, working, marrying or undergoing certain medical procedures without permission from a male relative.

“It is a crisis in dealing with modernity from the conservative society and the clerics,” said Hatoon al-Fassi, an associate professor of women’s history at King Saud University in Riyadh. “Every time something new occurs, they are suspicious and immediately think there must be a conspiracy of some kind that wants to decay our society.”

Harvey Nichols has served as a pioneering case, benefiting from a small staff, ample resources and, of course, a royal boss.

“This store is a big social experiment because we are talking about ladies who had severe obstacles in coming here,” said Princess Reema, 38, who was educated in the United States while her father, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, served as ambassador.

Leading a visitor through her now music-free store, she explained that she had opened a nursery for employees’ children and given transportation stipends to women who could not drive themselves to work.

The store does not regulate face veils, she said, adding that some women prefer to cover their faces at work.

“Their families don’t necessarily want other people to know that their daughter is working in retail,” she said. For the same reason, female employees do not wear name tags.

Two years ago, the store employed only 12 Saudi women, she said, including herself. That number has nearly quadrupled since then, she said, and it will keep growing.

Jawharah, a 35-year-old saleswoman standing between racks of high-end dresses in a full face veil, said that this was her first job and that her husband had inspected the store before letting her take it.

While her mother and aunts never worked, she said, all of her sisters now do. “It’s nice to get out and work and get paid,” she said.
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