More than a year ago, Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Fahd directed that all government departments must open special women’s sections to handle all business related to women. The move was intended to facilitate the processing of women’s paperwork and, in addition, provide new job opportunities for women to work in the special sections.
The directions were given but unfortunately, nothing has changed; women continue to suffer — they continue to be inconvenienced each time they have to go to a government department to carry out official business.
While government departments continue their usual foot-dragging, the private sector has once again proved it can move much faster than any government agency or department when it comes to empowering women. The reason is simple: The public sector lacks mechanisms to carry out decisions.
What we have today can scarcely be called women’s sections. They are in fact no more than windows through which women hand papers to women employees inside. The papers are then forwarded to male employees in other offices where final decisions are made. In the end, it is men who process the papers rather than women. Many departments do not even have these almost makeshift sections.
Women continue to go to government offices, and each time they are told to bring a male guardian with them so that their documents can be processed. Imagine the suffering of a divorced woman or a widow who has no male guardian to look after her affairs. Faced with such a situation, women resort to hiring someone they may not know well and having to rely on him. Even if a woman does not want others to know about her private business or financial situation, she finds herself forced to surrender the basic human right of privacy and hire a male to do the work for her. I don’t really expect to see women’s sections being opened soon to handle women’s affairs from A to Z, but the least we should expect is to have sections that take care of the basics.
Conditions in the existing women’s sections attached to some government departments are pathetic. Some offices use a tiny room, barely big enough to accommodate three people at a time. This reflects negatively on government departments, to say nothing of the bad impression carried away by a member of the public who has to make even a single visit.
