The report in Al-Madinah daily last week that claimed 682,000 Saudi women had turned down private sector jobs offered to them by the Labor Ministry’s Hafiz unemployment assistance program was shocking and disappointing. After all, with unemployment among the more than one million Saudi women seeking employment hitting 77 percent, who are they to turn down job opportunities? Are we really such a nation of spoiled offspring that we can afford to do so? I hardly think so.
The newspaper explained that the women rejected employment in the private sector because 265,000 of them wanted a government job and 417,000 of them wanted a job in the education sector. For sure, there has been a long tradition of the Saudi government being the employer of choice for most Saudis, but this must change and thankfully is changing. After all, we are a capitalistic society that believes in a free market and private property rights, so why this aversion to being employed by the private sector? Many will say it is because of the perceived lower salaries, longer working hours, and of course the greater job insecurity compared to the jobs for life that employment in the government typically provides.
On the surface this may all seem true, but dig a little deeper and one will see that salaries in the private sector most often grow much faster than in government, and the longer hours in the private sector are usually rewarded with extra pay or bonuses, something the public sector never provides.
It is unfortunate that so many Saudi women still feel either so accustomed to the old ways or insecure that they are insisting on employment in the government sector, to the point that they are choosing unemployment over accepting a job in the private sector!
In my opinion that is pure madness, but obviously they are not desperate enough and other family members must be financially helping them out, allowing them the luxury of opting to remain unemployed.
For sure women still face many problems in the job market, from low salaries compared to men, to a lack of government-run free day care centers for their children, to affordable and safe transportation to get to work. But this is where the government and the private sector must join hands and work together to find solutions to these urgent problems. Already there are more Saudi women studying in universities than men, and we cannot expect all of them to just sit at home after graduating twiddling their thumbs, especially with the economic pressures on many families to have more than one income.
Al-Madinah quoted good news though from a report issued by the Central Department of Statistics and Information that shows the steady increase of women working in the private sector. Until 2010 there were only 55,600 women employed in the private sector, but that number soon grew to 99,400 after the Ministry of Labor started its Nitaqat program to encourage Saudization. By 2012 there were 215,800 women working in the private sector, and by 2013 their number more than doubled to 454,000.
For sure, new job opportunities for women in shops and factories helped fuel the rise in numbers of Saudi women in the private sector. But much more needs to be done to convince more of them to enter this sector. The Saudi government cannot be expected to provide gainful employment to all Saudis, male and female, for the rest of times. That is unrealistic and unhealthy. The private sector has to do more to make itself more attractive to women job seekers. Providing child care and transportation services to female employees would be an excellent place to begin.
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The writer is a Saudi journalist based in Brazil.
