RIYADH, 30 January 2005 — As more Saudi women enter the workplace, they are discovering a facet of employment they didn’t count on — sexual harassment.
From being discouraged from wearing traditional Saudi dress to being selected based on their looks rather than their abilities, women are finding a set of unwritten — and illegal — rules at many businesses across the Kingdom.
Take the case of Mutaira, a woman who possessed all the necessary credentials for a job at a private hospital but was told she’d be expected to reveal her face and wear makeup. She told them it was against her culture. They hired somebody else.
But women who get hired also can face continuing sexual harassment from day to day on the job.
“I applied for a job as a phone sales agent,” said one young woman who requested anonymity, fearing reprisals. “After I got the job, my supervisor, an expat from another Arab country, was picking on me because I was wearing my hijab. I was doing my job perfectly, but that didn’t seem to matter to him.”
What did matter to him was trying to reshape the young woman to suit his personal tastes.
“He was asking me to laugh with clients and to take off my hijab,” she said. “I refused because I come from a conservative family. He wanted me to look more like the other women in the department and wear makeup and to speak casually with men.”
For women who are unwilling to play the game, they get to face a different level of sexual harassment.
“When I refused all his demands, he started to pick on me during work and ordered me to double my sales quota,” she said. “My female co-workers were doing half of the sales that I was doing, and they were not picked on.”
It’s a way managers get around firing young women, which might attract the attention of the Ministry of Labor. Instead they force them to quit.
“In the end, I couldn’t achieve the quota he set for me, and I would not obey his orders, so I left the job,” she said. “I was not sad about leaving that disgusting job anyway. Currently, I am looking for a job that will accept me for my qualifications and not for the way I look.”
Ghada Al-Saleh says many private companies are skirting the laws. According to her, most of the jobs have an unwritten code you have to agree to be abused or you lose. For many women, they lose either way.
“I graduated from business school, but I couldn’t find a job,” Al-Saleh said. “I applied for a job in public relations at an advertising agency.”
In her case, the trial period felt more like she was being put on trial for her cultural values.
“There were some strange things that were happening inside that company,” she said. “I couldn’t become like them in terms of makeup and the way they spoke with clients. I have my own standards of speech, and I wouldn’t stoop to their standards. All my female co-workers were smokers who bragged about the amount of makeup they wore. So I failed to pass the three-month trial period and didn’t qualify for the job.”
There’s a Western business saying that asks “Can you walk the walk and talk the talk?” The phrase alludes to whether a supervisor truly applies the techniques of modern management. In Saudi Arabia, women are finding the maxim applied literally — and used as a means of sexual harassment.
“The manager of the employment department asked me if I could walk in front of him, which was very strange thing to ask,” said Faiza, a woman who applied for a job at a private hospital. “I don’t know how I did it, but I walked in front of him. I was given the job because the manager liked the way I walked.”
As she was more interested in a health care job than a job as a runway fashion model, she eventually sought other employment — as did many of her colleagues. “A few months later I left the job because of the manager and many parents convinced their daughters to leave the hospital because of the manager’s bad reputation.”
Sexual harassment serves no other purpose than to suit the irresponsible desires of managers and supervisors to dominate women and make the workplace an unfriendly, sometimes tortuous, environment in which to work. It serves no company purpose and often flies in the face of all reason.
“I do not know why some managers have something against the face cover because it is part of our culture,” said Khayreya, who works at the King Khaled Eye Hospital. “I don’t think the face cover prevents me from doing my work. In Western countries, we see female workers in hospitals working with masks on to protect against germs. It works as a face cover, and Western hospital managers don’t have anything against that.”
And as more women enter the Saudi work force to provide valuable skills and services, it will be up to company owners, managers and government officials to decide if women are truly respected in our culture or if sexual harassment will become a condition of employment for their wives and daughters.
