JEDDAH, 29 July 2007 — The Ministry of Social Affairs is considering whether to employ Saudi women as housemaids to decrease the rate of unemployment among women which, according to the Ministry of Labor, reached 26 percent in 2006.
The ministry aims to help women support their families, especially since around two million Saudis are poor, said Labor Minister Ghazi Al-Gosaibi. By employing Saudis, MOSA also aims to decrease the number of foreign housemaids coming to the Kingdom.
Although some Saudis sympathize with poor women and support Saudi maids, many others are against the idea and consider such jobs as degrading to the status of Saudi women.
In a recent newspaper interview, a Saudi housemaid said that if people knew where she goes every morning then they would stop her and criticize her. “If they gave me another solution I would accept it, but they don’t. So there’s no need for them to know,” the woman said.
Samira Ismail, a 61-year-old woman, said 30 to 40 years ago her family employed Saudi housemaids. “They were loyal, trustworthy and helped us only during the day because they had families of their own to take care of,” she said. Ismail supports the idea of having Saudi housemaids but only for women who are over 50.
“If these women were young, then they may feel uneasy being surrounded by men, who may flirt with them. Who knows what the consequences of that may be?” she said.
With a recent uproar in Egypt over the prospect of Egyptian women taking jobs as housemaids in the Kingdom, a classified advert seeking a Saudi housemaid who speaks English and is IT literate was published in the Egyptian Al-Karamah newspaper. The advert was most probably published in jest.
The person, who had requested the advert, was willing to pay 1,200 Egyptian pounds and said he had received many phone calls from people who were happy that finally someone had requested for a Saudi housemaid. He added that Saudis were upset at the advert and contacted him to express their disappointment.
Following an uproar about the prospect of seeing Egyptian women working as housemaids in Saudi Arabia, Egyptian Minister of Manpower and Immigration Aisha Abdul Hadi refused to allow Egyptians to work in the Kingdom as housemaids.
“Why should we allow Saudi women to work as housemaids if people in Egypt, where poverty is more, have prevented their women from coming to the Kingdom as maids?” said Maha Abdul Razaq, a Saudi woman. “The authorities need to help these women, but through different ways,” she added.
Ghada Al-Turaif, a sociologist at Riyadh’s King Saud University, also objected to the idea. She told Asharq Al-Awsat, a sister publication of Arab News, that the prospect of Saudis working as housemaids is something that would not be accepted by their families.
“This is unhelpful. This would take us back and is the worse type of abuse these women could possibly experience,” she said.
She suggested that in order to solve the problem, the best thing to do would be to educate women and give them the skills needed to work in factories and beauty salons.
Faiza Al-Zahrani, a Saudi woman in her late 40s, said: “Maybe it is time for us to hire Saudi women so we can begin to feel how hard it actually is for foreigners to come and work here and leave their families.”
She added that having a maid of the same nationality would hopefully draw the maid close to the family and force Saudi parents to spend more time with their children and not make silly demands of their maids.
