In a recent TV interview, an official commented on my article dealing with the high rate of unemployment among Saudi women. In my article I mentioned that according to statistics from 1998, the number of working age Saudi women was 3.9 million.
Only 215,600 of them were working which was 5.5 percent of working age Saudi women and 0.03 percent of the total national workforce.
That means the unemployment rate among women, according to this statistic, was 94.5 percent. The official disagreed when I included in the unemployment rate all women who are unemployed, or who are of working age whether they want to work or not, or who had looked for or not looked for work and were capable of working.
Calculating unemployment among women is very risky in developed countries because the results can easily mislead. Even if poor countries had the means to calculate unemployment, they should not exclude women from the figures and provide statistics based only on male joblessness.
How can we calculate the unemployment rate scientifically if we deny women the environment to apply for jobs and work in? We pay no attention to their requests for work nor does anyone respond to their complaints. They are forced to rely on their husbands, fathers and male relatives in order to apply for a job.
Those men usually accept the usual comment from officials who say, “We cannot find jobs for men so how can we find them for women?”
We face two problems when we talk about unemployment. First is our inability to measure it since the means for doing so does not exist. Second is the reason why unemployment is increasing. We should not mix the two.
We need to increase awareness of unemployment in order to get an overview of the problem so we can find solutions. In Western societies, male and female students know what unemployment means and how it is measured.
In our country, we do not know how to deal with unemployment, let alone measure its percentage and rates.
- Arab News Local Press 13 September 2003
