WOMEN IN BUSINESS: Meaning business

The election of two women to the Jeddah Chamber of Commerce & Industry (JCCI) last year provided another example of the growing prominence of women in Saudi Arabia's business sector.

'It is excellent, we need more and more,' says long-time educational activist Princess Loulwah al-Faisal, who gave the keynote address to the annual Women in Business International Forum (WIB) in London on 6 December.

Even the candidature of females in the elections for the Jeddah chamber was a first. None had ever run before, nor had any voted. The ultimate success therefore of Taher and Lama Sulaiman in an election with female voters and candidates marks a psychologically important moment for the kingdom. Saudi Arabia has a significant business sector driven by female entrepreneurs, but this 'shadow economy' remains unregulated and many of the women involved are marginalised from the wider business world. While Saudi women officially make up just 4 per cent of the total workforce - or 10.7 per cent of the indigenous workforce - unofficial estimates from the Planning & Development Ministry puts their contribution at 30 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP). The JCCI election is a sign that this is changing and that the role of women in the kingdom's economy is increasingly becoming recognised. Saudi Arabia has long held up its education system as proof of a fundamentally egalitarian society. Officially, girls are given the same access to education as boys right up to university level, where the numbers of female university entrants is comparable to - and sometimes exceeds - that of males. In fact, as Princess Loulwah is keen to emphasise, 'there are more female than male graduates and there are more women graduating with better grades from school'. However, once through the education system, women in the kingdom find they do not have the same career opportunities as their male counterparts. Princess Loulwah believes that this is not merely a question of gender, but rather part of wider issues in Saudi Arabia's employment market affecting both men and women. 'It is not a question of gender inequality but simply that there are no jobs,' she says. 'The equality of men and women in the workplace has been a long tradition of Saudi Arabia - it is in our blood. In fact, the jobs are there, but the areas in which these young men and women have decided to become experts are not the jobs that are on the market. It is a mismatch. So now they are retraining in order to be able to find jobs.' Training and education were the principal themes of Princess Loulwah's WIB address, in which she argued that young women in Saudi Arabia needed to acquire leadership and networking skills in order to compete in a globalised world. She also believes it is up to Saudi Arabia's private sector to do more to promote opportunities for women. 'We get a lot of support from the government,' she says. 'King Abdullah, and King Fahd a few years ago, have both said that women should be more involved in all walks of life - for example, bank loans are supported by the government. At present, the large majority of women officially in work are employed by the government, mainly in the health, education and social sectors. King Abdullah's 'nine-point plan' is, in part, designed to redress the balance. 'There is a proactive move to take women into the private business structure,' says Princess Loulwah. The plan requires that women must be trained in business practice and that land is allocated for the development of female-run businesses. Chambers of Commerce have also been encouraged to set up training programmes for women. However, the private sector has actually been very late in coming to the issue.' Princess Loulwah says the fault has been one of inefficiency rather than deliberate obstruction and believes that although Saudi companies have fai