I woke up on Friday morning to the shocking news that our father had passed away. A father that I always felt was my protector and my shield against those who oppose women’s participation in Saudi society. The death of King Abdullah is a loss for all of Saudi Arabia and his absence will be felt by Saudis for years to come.

But his passing is especially painful to Saudi women, who considered this much beloved man their father. Because without King Abdullah, we wouldn’t have made the progress we are now witnessing. What King Abdullah accomplished in a decade to give women better opportunities would have taken someone else a lifetime to fulfill.

He is credited worldwide as a reformer, but his legacy for half the population of Saudi Arabia will be that he was a champion of women’s rights. He started modestly by giving women the right to hold jobs as supermarket cashiers, although the move met with strong resistance from conservatives who argued that cashiers’ contact with the public, especially men, would be detrimental to their morals.

That, of course, never happened because the king wisely anticipated Saudi society’s capability for change on an incremental level. Now, not only are women cashiers a routine presence in supermarkets, but thousands of women now work as retail clerks in virtually every mall in all the major cities across the Kingdom. Imagine their contributions now to the economic and intellectual growth of our country thanks to these advances. That was a feat unthinkable before King Abdullah assumed the throne.

He named the first woman member of the Council of Ministers as a deputy minister in the Ministry of Education and he appointed 30 women to the Shoura Council. He gave women the right to vote.

Without question, his most important contribution to our country was the implementation of the scholarship program in his name that offers a full scholarship to Saudis to study abroad.

More than 150,000 Saudis in 2014 were studying in foreign countries. Nearly 45,000 were enrolled at universities in the United States for the 2011/2012 academic year. More than 10,000 Saudis were enrolled at universities in the United Kingdom during 2010/2011.

I was among those Saudis in England, and thanks to King Abdullah I earned my doctorate degree in 2012. I received my scholarship at a time when I had lost all hopes of pursing my Ph.D. because the cost to obtaining that degree was out of my reach. My father saved me like he saved thousands of other women who might otherwise be forced to remain in the house without the opportunity to experience the world. Now more than 60 percent of all scholarship students graduating from universities are women. For those Saudi female graduates, there is a lot of grieving today. He spearheaded the $12.5 billion King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), which is now among the top universities worldwide and became the first Saudi university to have a mixed gender environment.

King Abdullah’s legacy will be that he brought Saudi Arabia into the 21st century and made the Kingdom a global player far beyond our reputation as the world’s oil supplier. He modernized our country with extensive infrastructure projects, introduced a mass transit system on rail that is currently under way, and he made Makkah a safer place for Haj pilgrims.

But for millions of women, our father will always be remembered as the man who opened the doors of opportunity for us. He gave us education. He gave us jobs.