Saudi Arabia Signals Openness to Women Seeking Work

When Glowork.net, a recruitment site for women in Saudi Arabia, started up last year, its founder, Khalid al-Khudairi, was hit with a deluge of threatening e-mail and phone calls warning him to shut down because he was violating cultural norms.

Now the Saudi Ministry of Labor has asked him to help encourage women to find work. The government turned to the start-up because many of those seeking jobs in the kingdom are women.

The government has even announced plans to form a "woman friendly" city in the eastern province of Hofuf next year, aiming to bolster employment opportunities for women without transgressing religious boundaries.

"Saudi women are educated, willing to work and tired of waiting," said Mr. Khudairi, who is 29. "It could have accelerated from the Arab Spring, but women in the region have been speaking out more, de manding equal rights and good positions for years. And now we're seeing real change in Saudi."

As part of an effort to reduce the 2.4 billion Saudi riyals, or $640 million, spent on unemployment benefits last year alone, the ministry gave Glowork access to all its unemployment data, including 1.6 million résumés, 1.2 million of them from women. Glowork will be paid a fee for every candidate who finds a job.

Photo A workshop for women at Glowork.net, a recruitment site for women in Saudi Arabia. Credit Jasniya Badsha

Reaching out to Glowork is one of several changes affecting women in the Saudi workplace.

Adel Fakieh, the Saudi labor minister, appointed in August 2010, has pushed through a "feminization" program that has included replacing the men who work in sales at lingerie stores with women.

That may seem humorous, but it was important for gender equality in a country where religious conservatives deem it inappropriate for women to work outside the home.

Jewelry stores are following suit, and stores that sell abayas, the coverings women are required to wear, will be feminized next year.

The minister initially met with resistance not only from conservatives but also from business owners. They doubted whether they would find enough Saudi women to hire.

Saudis also expect to earn double the monthly salary of 1,500 riyals paid to an experienced expatriate worker, typically a South Asian.

"Introducing women into the Gulf private sector work force will not be easy, and there is a risk of moving too fast, as you cannot simply replace one skilled expat worker with a national woman," said Leila Hoteit, a consultant at Booz & Co. in the United Arab Emirates. " In the longer term, this change is inevitable; attitudes in the region are changing, and many companies are actively defining their vision to help women play a more central role in the region's labor market."

Of Saudi Arabia's population of 28 million, 45 percent are women. About 57 percent of Saudi women have university degrees, according to a recent study by Oxford Strategic Consulting.

Yet women make up only 15 percent of the labor force. Roughly 60 percent of women with Ph.D. degrees are not working, according to a recent study by Booz.

Limited participation by women in the work force is ingrained in Gulf culture despite recent efforts to e ncourage them to work. Oxford Strategic Consulting says an expectation in the region to put family and childcare first is the main barrier to women seeking work, followed by inappropriate work conditions, poor training and a male-dominated culture.

For those women who want to work, finding a job is still not easy. The process of recruiting by companies taken for granted elsewhere is not well developed in the kingdom.

Some women give up trying. Aia al-Khudairi, the sister of Glowork's founder, gave up after a year of asking her driver to shuttle her from bank to bank, dropping résumés off with security guards. Now 22, Ms. Khudairi is completing a master's degree in Canada.

Amal al-Rashed, 25, was unemployed for two years after graduation from King Saud University in her hometown, Riyadh. It used to be that the only way to get a job in Saudi Ar abia — even at international companies — was through a connection. That is how she landed at an events management company that she did not really like.

"Our university had no career guidance; they didn't teach us anything about working, never ever," Ms. Rashed said. "I really struggled to find a job after graduating even though I had good grades, but I kept at it until finally, like most people, a friend eventually got me in the door at her company."

A year into her job, she received a text message about Glowork and decided to upload her résumé and apply for positions online — even though she had no faith in recruiting procedures.

T o her surprise, in 10 days, she received a phone call offering an interview. Shortly after, she was hired at Brandbuzz, a marketing agency in Saudi Arabia. She has been working there for a year.

Within six months of its start, Glowork.net, which cost $450,000 in self-financed capital, grew to a network of 2,200 companies that want to hire women.

Glowork charges $700 to employers for each candidate, from initial screening to mentoring, and $300 a month to give companies access to candidates' résumés via Glowork. Members now include multinationals like Microsoft, Pepsi and General Electric as well as smaller local firms.

A maj or difficulty in employing women in Saudi is that separate offices must be set up for them.

"If they hire women to work, they need another office, with electricity, a dedicated security guard, computers," Mr. Khudairi said. "This is a major cost, especially for small, local companies.

"So we came up with a solution that also gives companies the choice of hiring women to work out of home."

Through cloud computing technology, women at home are given work stations that have systems to allow their employers to monitor closely what they are doing, including their phone calls and every computer click. An employer can monitor someone directly from an iPhone.

Aside from saving on transportation costs, this technology helps make it easier for women in rural areas to work. It also helps those with disabilities or with children. All that is needed is an Internet connection.

Glowork also finds women to work in more conventional settings. Aramex, a global logistics firm, has built the staff of its women's call center in Jeddah up to 51 through Glowork. The building where they work is a separate office for women only. Cameras monitor the hallways.

"It was a challenge for me to find attractive résumés at a time when our business in Saudi was expanding," Ehtesham Hanif, the head of human resou rces at Aramex in Jeddah, said by telephone. "There are difficulties in Saudi when it comes to hiring women because of the separate environments. I had to answers questions like: Will our manager be male? Will we sit beside male staff?"

Glowork now wants to expand into the rest of the Gulf, starting in Oman and Qatar.

Mr. Khudairi notes that 140,000 Saudi students are now studying abroad on government scholarships and that the kingdom now has a major new women's university — Princess Nora University.

"Why do we educate our women and then expect them to just sit at home?" he asked.