Nic Robertson explains why Saudi Arabia is planning a city exclusively for working women.
Saudi Arabia plans to build a women-only industrial city in its eastern province of Hofuf, apparently the first of such enclaves creating jobs for women in sectors like textiles, pharmaceuticals and food processing. In such cities, firms and production lines will only employ women. The idea is to close the wide employment gap between Saudi men and women, empowering the latter without upsetting sharia-based rules of gender segregation. That’s nice. But will the Saudis allow women to drive within these cities? Or, in the absence of men, will they have to walk up and down town in the burning desert sun?
Not being allowed to drive is just the tip of Saudi’s sexist sand-dune. Currently, Saudi norms prohibit women from voting, travelling, choosing marriage partners, opening bank accounts, even having major surgery without the consent of a male ‘guardian’. Against such overwhelming discrimination, where one gender is seen as ‘superior’ and hence stands more powerful relative to the other, how will having a job – if and until your male guardian consents, at that – really change anything?
Such enclaves, harking back to harems where women could play when men were away, will actually increase the segregation of Saudi women into corners of hard labour with few rights – somewhat like South Africa’s separate zones between black and white people, different rules governing these against a context of deep inequality. Then the world called it apartheid – and unacceptable. It’s time the Saudi regime takes a tip from more progressive Islamic states -Indonesia and Turkey are good examples where women have equivalent rights blended with religious custom – and enables women to be equal citizens in the public and private spaces they inhabit. Not move them to mirages in the desert.
