JEDDAH, 18 July 2007 — Government departments as well private companies have started setting up more women-only work centers to handle an increasing number of women who are expected to enter the work force.

The Ministry of Telecommunications and Information Technology recently embarked on a major project aimed at setting up office space for women workers at the ministry. According to a report carried by Al-Madinah Arabic daily, the ministry will set up three such centers in the first stage.

The ministry intends to establish similar centers in the Kingdom’s 13 regions and major cities at a later stage. In a previous statement, the Labor Ministry had said that it would coordinate with the telecom and IT ministry to establish infrastructure facilities required by such work centers.

Nearly 250,000 Saudi women currently work at government departments and 45,000 others at private firms. The number of Saudi women is expected to exceed that of their Saudi male counterparts by 2010 when the Saudi population is estimated to cross 26 million, according to a report by the Riyadh Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Furthermore, Saudi women are more likely to have advanced degrees than the men.

Muhammad Mandoura, a specialist in information technology and the owner of a consultancy firm, also emphasized the growing trend in the United States, Japan and Europe of working from a home-office that is connected to a corporate office, allowing workers to do their jobs from home with an Internet-connected PC, a process known as telecommuting.

Work-at-home freelancers (self-employed individuals, such as freelance writers, translators or designers) make up a considerable portion of telecommuters — using their home office to communicate and collaborate with their clients.

Telecommuting seems fit for Saudi society, which is grappling with the moral implications of allowing men and women to work together. Saudi Arabia is a conservative society, and contrary to popular notions in the West that men enforce these gender-segregation laws on women, a lot of Saudi women say they prefer to have places reserved for them so long as they be granted equal access to jobs and services.

“This system allows people, especially women, to select the working time suitable for them to complete their assignments,” Mandoura said. “Many things can be done from these work centers,” he said.

Economist Hind Al-Ashaikh of King Saud University believes that the new system would be very convenient for women, especially for those who cannot go for work outside because of family and health problems.

According to a study conducted by Wala Hanafi, telecommuting and giving women more access to office space will provide them more independence. In the absence of supervisors or bosses, women can organize their work-hours and create a work-environment suitable for them.

(Critics of telecommuting have said that productivity is an issue, because there is no day-to-day supervision of an individual’s work performance, especially among salaried employees with a high level of job security — which is the case among Saudi employees. Freelance writers and designers often emphasize the need for a high level of self-control and discipline to succeed in a self-regulated work environment.)

Hanafi said the system would cut production costs of companies, help them get qualified women employees for relatively smaller wages and reduce the rate of dropouts among the work force.

According to Hanafi, the system can be implemented in various sectors and industries including information technology, journalism, website designing, data entry, translation, research, consultancy and electronic trade and marketing.