Saudi Arabia Must Turn to Women for Growth - Building Gender Balanced Business

• With the sharp drop in the price of oil, Saudi Arabia’s happy times are once again over, and the only real hope for creating a vibrant and lasting economic strength is to employ all the country’s labour resources — and that means women.

• Women make up 57% of university graduates but only 15% of the workforce, in part because of strict rules against any mix of men and women in public. Of those women who do work, 86% are in education.

• But Bloomberg News says that with the population growing and inflation averaging 9.9% in 2008, more women will have to enter the workforce. “Unless you’re very wealthy in Saudi Arabia, you cannot maintain a comfortable standard of living without two incomes,” John Sfakianakis, chief economist at the Saudi bank SABB told Bloomberg. “That is compelling women to work.”

• “[T]hey’re not allowing women to develop fast enough in the workplace,” Jean-Francois Seznec of the center for contemporary Arab studies at Georgetown University said of the Saudi authorities. “They’re aware of this, but it’s very, very slow.”

• Until 2005, a Saudi woman could start a business only if a male manager handled such tasks as signing company checks. Very few women have become prominent entrepreneurs even since the repeal of the rule.

The Bloomberg report