The World Health Organization tells us that one of the biggest predictors of children’s wellbeing and long-term health is the social status of the child’s mother. If mothers are poor, subsisting on low wages or not paid at all, and have inadequate access to services, children will do poorly. One of the best ways to build a healthier population in the long-term is to protect the status of women.
In today’s world, it is simply impossible to do so without creating suitable and accessible employment opportunities for women. Much as many of us would like to embrace the traditional roles of women in the home, as primary caregiver for their children, the truth is that such a role, while it is still the choice of many, cannot be used as an excuse to bar women from employment.
To do so puts them and the whole family in jeopardy. Women, like men, have the need and the right to provide for themselves in the manner in which they choose. They have just as much need for a living wage and appropriate benefits in recompense for their labor. Work gives dignity, interest and focus to one’s life, and it borders on cruelty to bar half of our adult population from it.
In Saudi Arabia, we have a highly educated population, and it is becoming more so all the time with the increasing accessibility to post-secondary education. There are few differences between men and women with regard to education level. It is time for the disparities in lifelong employability to disappear as well.
The truth is, though, that gender inequalities in employment still exist worldwide. Several catchphrases common in the West come to mind: The “glass ceiling” that prevents female employees for attaining top positions in a company; the “second shift” of housework and childcare that women, disproportionately, find waiting for them after work hours; and the “mommy track,” a period of slowed down, necessarily flexible work time that occurs after a woman has children, but which negatively impacts her career in the long run.
These limitations plague the working life of women all over the world, thus explaining why it so happens that single women are the most impoverished groups in almost any society. Women all over the world are still working on attaining true equality in the workplace, as they have been for decades.
But here, we seem to place additional obstacles in place – for example, the absence of professional roles deemed appropriate for females, restrictions on the interaction of men and women in a public setting, and the fact that women going to work still have to pay for a driver to take them there. The last things women need are additional obstacles barring them from full and profitable employment.
What if we were to create a society in which women were as equal in the workplace as they are in the university classroom, and where their skills and knowledge were given a similar opportunity to shine? The initial discomfort and need for mental adjustment would be far eclipsed by the benefits for women, their families, and our entire society.
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