Document Type
Article
Publication Date
12-15-2016
Abstract
Women occupy only 15.8 percent of the private and public positions occupied by Saudi nationals, according to statistics from the Central Department of Statistics and Information 2015. The Saudi government has highlighted the need to support women's higher education and combat sociopolitical barriers to their employment. Despite facing substantial challenges to entering the labor market, females have made gains in Saudi society; these include higher literacy rates, greater employment, and moderate rates of entry into both positions of leadership and nontraditional careers. Qualitative research was based on semi-structured interviews with 30 women, 18 of whom had nontraditional careers and 12 of whom had left these for traditional careers. This research was motivated by the scarcity of literature about women's employment in Saudi Arabia. Findings should be of interest to public policy makers, as I believe that public discourse that supports women's economic participation and career development may influence patriarchal traditional attitudes towards women. Furthermore, I believe that stating the experiences of these women will provide inspirational role models for the next generation.
Keywords
women employees, career development--Saudi Arabia, women in economic development, Weatherhead School of Management, women, nontraditional careers, barriers, Saudi Arabia
Rights
© The Author(s). This is an open access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Department/Center
Design & Innovation
Recommended Citation
Dukhaykh, Suad, "Breaking Barriers: Saudi Women in Non Traditional Careers" (2016). Student Scholarship. 107.
https://commons.case.edu/studentworks/107