Saudi Arabian women voted for the first time but still can't drive. Should we be celebrating?

A Saudi woman casts her vote for the municipal elections at a polling station in Jeddah
A Saudi woman casts her vote for the municipal elections at a polling station in Jeddah Credit: Getty 

To say that Saudi Arabia’s local elections at the weekend were a small step for women is more literally true than most uses of the phrase. 

When women went to exercise their right to vote for the first time, they could not of course drive to the polling booths: in Saudi Arabia, as everyone knows, women’s rights only go so far, and driving is not that far.

Under rules of campaigning that would also stretch credulity elsewhere, female candidates were not allowed to address men directly (or vice versa) and could not stand at all without permission of the male head of their household, whether husband, father or brother.

Nevertheless, nearly 1,000 women ended up as candidates, and at least 20 at the time of writing had made it to elected office - something that might in itself come as a surprise to outsiders who view Saudi Arabia’s medieval restrictions on women’s personal freedoms as preventing them from having any public life at all.

The startling contradictions surrounding female participation in these elections - and women’s role in the kingdom more generally - are not just perceptions from outside. As I discovered last month when I visited the kingdom and met some of the candidates - and quite a large number of other educated, articulate and indeed vociferous other women - these are contradictions readily obvious to and argued over by Saudis themselves.

Haifa al-Hababi
Haifa al-Hababi, one of the candidates

Haifa al-Hababi, one of the candidates, told me she actually thought too much might be made of the legal restrictions surrounding her life, though having an evidently supportive husband, with whom I met her, no doubt helps. The British-educated architect, and now lecturer in architecture, was happy to chat unveiled in her Riyadh villa, wearing a tee-shirt reading “Punk’s Not Dead” - the epitome of a modern, internationally aware career woman.

Aziza Yousef, on the other hand, a veteran women’s rights activist, described Saudi Arabia more conventionally to me as “a North Korea for women”, and said she was personally boycotting the elections because they were worthless.

What both women represent is something that is undeniable in modern Saudi Arabia, and that may yet prove more important in the long term than the weekend’s elections.

Under the last king, Abdullah, who died in January, the government decided that whatever Saudi Arabia's social and religious future it would have to be an educated and more outward-looking one than in the past. 

"Saudi Arabia has a growing number of women entrepreneurs - it is simply easier to set up your own company in these circumstances than go to work for a man."

In the last decade, around 700,000 young Saudis have received full scholarships to study abroad - and a large proportion of those were women. In common with other Gulf countries, more than half of all undergraduates in Saudi Arabia are now female, and the result is a tidal wave of women with PhDs and Master’s degrees in everything from healthcare to business administration returning to the country.

Employment is not necessarily easy: the rules banning men and women “mixing”, including in the office, still apply. But even there, loop-holes are found, as long as the niceties are observed. 

One evening I attended an all-women book club at an office in downtown Riyadh. The woman host, who ran her own social enterprise from the offices, showed me the “men’s office” and the “women’s office” - and the meeting room and kitchen where all employees could in effect meet and chat freely. Other bosses have gone further - Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, Saudi Arabia's richest man, has won dispensation from the religious police such that there are no restrictions - not even the compulsory head-scarf - in his offices.

As a side-note, Saudi Arabia has a growing number of women entrepreneurs - it is simply easier to set up your own company in these circumstances than go to work for a man. 

In addition, a much-publicised ruling a couple of years back under which the king decreed that only women were allowed to serve behind the counter in lingerie shops had a knock-on effect of also allowing women to serve for the first time on supermarket check-outs and in similar shop jobs.

Hardly cutting edge feminism elsewhere - but in Saudi Arabia, this has led to half a million lesser educated women joining the workforce for the first time. In a country where socially conservative mores are popularly ascribed to the poorer and more provincial classes, this may have more of an effect than any other change in recent years.

But back to this historic election: even after the 1,000 women candidates came forward (compared to 6,000 men), it was not all plain sailing.

Loujain al-Hathloul
Loujain al-Hathloul

Two of the women I profiled - Loujain al-Hathloul, who shot to fame last year after she was arrested and jailed for driving across the Saudi Arabian border from the United Arab Emirates, and Naseema al-Assada, another veteran activist - were banned from standing.

Ms Hathloul was subsequently reinstated, though when she arrived at the polling booth she found her name was still missing. Ms Assada is challenging the decision to ban her in the courts.

She welcomed the move to allow women to participate, even in the restricted circumstances. As she pointed out, the husband of the woman who did win a seat on her council, in the town of Qateef, could technically stop her going to meetings if he didn’t like the nature of her decisions.

“I believe it’s a good step, just to get women involved,” she told me on the phone from Qateef today. “Even if the result doesn’t fully reflect what it should, it meant women had to actually campaign and face up to the challenge. We had men voting for women, and women voting for men.”

Quite.

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