By Olivia Allen
On Thursday, November 14th, the D’Amore-McKim Business School hosted Reem Asaad, a 2002 Northeastern University School of Business graduate and financial advisor and writer based in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia whose campaign to overturn a ban on female employment in the retail sector in Saudi Arabia created much-needed opportunities for economic inclusion.
The discomfort Asaad and other Saudi women experienced when buying lingerie, cosmetics, and accessories from male sales associates throughout their lives served as the impetus for the “Lingerie Campaign”. The campaign to allow women to work in retailers selling women’s products also aimed to address the larger issue of economic inclusion in Saudi Arabia. Besides the education and medicine sectors, Saudi women are largely absent from the workforce because women interacting with men outside of their families is stigmatized.
The “Lingerie Campaign”, which garnered an international following on Facebook and other social media platforms was successful in urging the Ministry of Labor to grant women the right to work in lingerie retailers in 2009. The implementation of the ruling was sluggish and not strictly enforced, prompting Asaad to call for a two-week boycott of lingerie retailers. Finally, in 2011 King Abdullah issued a directive that barred men from working in lingerie stores, thus creating an estimated 44,000 jobs in the retail sector reserved for women. The benefits of the campaign extended to tangential industries, such as cosmetics and women’s’ accessories, which are also encouraged to phase out male employees.
The relaxation of restrictions on women’s employment in the retail sector provided a valuable ingress into the workforce, and will hopefully pave the way for more reforms that favor female employment prospects in the future. At Northeastern, Asaad cited an anecdote of a female employee whose husband was supportive of her presence in the workforce upon realizing the increased prosperity her income provided for the family. Hopefully, this sentiment will spread amongst the population as government realizes that suppressing half of the workforce is not economically sustainable.
Economic empowerment appears to be the most promising conduit for women’s empowerment in the kingdom. The fight for political and social freedom for Saudi women has been a protracted process. Girls were not permitted to attend school until 1961 and are not permitted to drive, although many Saudi women have started to rebel against this law. Ironically, women will not be granted suffrage until 2015, but in 2013, 30 women were appointed to the Shura Council, which operates in an advisory capacity to the King Abdullah.
While there are select examples of upward mobility for women in Saudi Arabia, it is clear that these opportunities are exclusively reserved for the wealthy, married, and educated women. To reach the poorest women, social enterprise solutions offer a promising ingress into financial inclusion and dignity in a place that is ranked the third worst place in the world to be a woman, based on the criteria outlined in the U.N. Convention to Eliminate All Forms of Discrimination Against Women.
Asaad’s campaign was a critical step in the inclusion of women in the formal sector, but more must be done to ensure that women, especially those residing in the lower economic classes – have opportunities to find financial empowerment. Upon examining this problem through the social enterprise lens, microfinance immediately comes to mind as an enterprise solution that made considerable gains in women’s economic inclusion and dignity.
Just like Grameen Bank, the first MFI that pioneered women’s financial inclusion through providing small loans, poor women in Saudi could benefit from enterprise solutions, such as microfinance due to the limited employment opportunities in the private sector entrepreneurship. Asaad alluded to the existence of a few MFIs in Saudi Arabia. However, it is clear that t microfinance industry must grow in Saudi Arabia to reach the millions of women that don’t have access to private sector jobs.
Sources:
http://www.trust.org/spotlight/poll-womens-rights-in-the-arab-world/
http://americanbedu.com/2012/12/31/saudi-arabia-who-is-reem-asaad/
