No more than 50 Saudi female engineers are registered at the Saudi Council of Engineers, according to Hamad Al-Shakawi, the organization’s chairman.

Al-Shakawi described the issue as “shameful” and a poor reflection on the development of existing programs.

“I honestly do not know exactly what problems female engineers face and I do not know what the causes of these issues are, but social status appears to be certainly one of the main reasons because we are a conservative society,” said Al-Shakawi. “Views that the overall work environment in the engineering field does not fit the Saudi woman are not true. We need their engineering creativity at special engineering consulting offices.”

He said there is lack of balance between the number of female graduates in engineering colleges and the need of the labor market for them after graduation.

“The number is shameful and I shall give an example of the University of Dammam, formerly called King Faisal University,” he said. “When the university established a design division, it continued for five years and then closed for a period of another five years, after which it reopened as a college of design by itself.”

What surprised him, he said, is that the number of alumnus barely reached 350 engineers, with an average of 10 to 15 graduate female engineers enrolled each year.

“This means that there are fewer than 1,000 female engineers out of a population of 20 million,” he said. “This is not normal at all, especially that the number of Saudi female engineers enrolled in the council does not exceed 50 engineers.”

Al-Shakawi said that female engineers were invited to form committees in all parts of the Kingdom as a way to encourage interaction with one another and overcome any problems they face.

He also said that the council is about to initiate a process of educational campaigns in schools to demonstrate the importance of engineering departments in general. He noted that the most important act that must be followed to increase the number of female engineers is to make obtaining a license to practice the profession a necessity to prevent intruders in the profession.