I can’t understand why we still have men at the head of every department related to girls’ education in the Kingdom. And to make things even worse, these men have hundreds of male subordinates reporting to them. All of this of course takes place in departments responsible for girls’ education. Most of the men employed in these jobs work in finance, administration or in jobs requiring technical skills.
The nature of the work done by these armies of male employees requires them to deal with hundreds of thousands of female students, teachers and administrators. The irony is that the men are holding jobs that should have long ago been taken over by highly educated and qualified women who now find themselves confined to a very narrow range of jobs.
This situation may have been justified when women’s education in its early stages and there were few women qualified to do administrative, financial or technical jobs. Now, however, things have changed and there are hundreds of women with college and post-graduate degrees and thousands of others who have been trained in computer science, finance and administration. I see no reason why the current bizarre situation should be allowed to continue.
This unfortunate state of affairs is happening at a time when everyone is calling for women to do more jobs and for additional jobs to be open to them. How can this worthwhile goal be achieved if the very jobs that should be done by women are given to men, thus forcing women to seek other and less rewarding employment?
The truth is that hundreds of jobs that should have been reserved for women were snatched from them by men. This is a matter of national interest and merits intervention by the Shoura Council.
What is wrong in having a woman as director of a girls education department if she is qualified to do what is needed? What is wrong in a woman director having women assistants and other women employees in administrative, finance and technical jobs reporting to her? Is such work reserved for men only? Even if there is a need for having a men’s section to handle certain technical matters, the men working in these sections should report to a woman director and not necessarily to a man as is the case now.
The simple question I want to ask is this: If the kind of work done by these male directors in girls’ education involves managing girls’ schools which means these men must be in contact with school managers and other staff who are all women, why not take the shortest and most obvious route and put women at the head of the department? At the same time, some male directors think that a request or a proposal presented by a woman should not receive an immediate response even if the matter is urgent. It is such male chauvinism as this that results in delays when schools require maintenance to keep them in good shape. Such behavior, as we have seen in the past, can result in tragic accidents, including fires, which may claim innocent lives.
