International Journal of Social Work and Human Services Practice Horizon Research Publishing Vol.4. No.1 March, 2016, pp. 1-6 Strategies to Empower Saudi Women’s Educational Attainment and Work Hind Bint Faie Al-Shahrani College of Social Work, Princes Nourah Bint Abdualrahman University, Saudi Arabia *Corresponding Author: hfalsharani@pnu.edu.sa, dr.hend1@hotmail.com Abstract This research attempts to build strategies to empower Saudi women’s educational attainment and work through reframing of social welfare strategies. The findings of a major study are reported here. Keywords Saudi Women, Empowerment, Social Welfare Policies Introduction The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) is one of the conservative countries in the world; therefore, the kingdom faces strands of challenges for attainment of gender equalities. This research is an attempt to develop strategies to empower Saudi women in work and qualification realms. Women’s empowerment remains fundamental to development of any economy. Research conducted by UNDP, UNIFEM, and the World Bank too confirms that gender inequalities; especially in the developing nations are one of the key reasons impeding both economic growth and development. For instance, Mayoux (2005) argued that those nations that are biased towards gender inequalities indeed suffer from higher poverty, poor economic growth and lower living standard and of course, very timid governance. Mayoux (2005) goes on to argue that implementation of sustainable micro-finance programs among the poorest women in the 1990s have been one of the key strategies in alleviating poverty— indicating that the target group of women were not only empowered economically but they developed a number of skills such as entrepreneurial, organizational, decision-making, which in turn boosted their self-reliance. Having said this, with respect to Saudi women’s workforce participation, it constitutes only 20%. i Of course, women’s participation rates have steadily increased from 15.3% in 1990 to 18.6% in 2011. ii In another report published in the Al-Riyadh daily newspaper, combining the public and the private sectors, women comprises only 14.6% of the total workers in the Kingdom. Nonetheless, the percentage of participation of Saudi women in the labour market drops down further to 6.1%, when female foreign expatriate workers are included. iii This figure is meagre when compared to over 40% female labor force participation in other Muslim nations—Kuwait, Malaysia and the United Arab Emirates, (AlMunajjed, 2010). This signals that Saudi Women’s economic empowerment remains utterly limited despite their estimated literacy rates being 91.1% in 2015, iv and women constitutes 60% of all university graduates. v Indeed, out of 136 countries, the 2013 Global Gender Gap report published by the World Economic Forum, 2013 placed Saudi Arabia in the 127th position, the value of its gender gap index being 0.59. It is worth noting here that Iceland occupied the first position bearing a gender gap value of 0.87, while Yemen ranked 136 with a gender gap value of 0.51. vi Notwithstanding, men and women remain highly segregated in the public spaces of the Kingdom. Until 2005, Saudi women’s participation in the labour market remained limited to those arenas where they seldom encountered male counterparts— teachers, nurses, doctors and women’s banks. Since 2011, King Abdullah has issued several decrees to replace male employees with females for those shops and departments that sell women’s garments and cosmetics such as lingeries, cosmetics, abayas vii and wedding dresses. Evidently, these decrees coincided with the Arab Spring beginning in Tunisia in December 2010. While the activists construed these decrees as endeavors to forestall pro-democratic dissents, religious police (locally known as Hai'a men or mutaween) viii and conservatives argued that increase of female employment in the labor market have increased their everyday interaction with men outside their families (Zoepf, 2013). This escalated dispute between the female employees of the stores, women customers, Ministry of Labor on one hand and religious and conservative leaders on the other hand. Indeed, in November 2013, 200 religious leaders and the Ministry congregated at a meeting to frame new regulations for female employees (Zoepf, 2013). At the same time, these religious leaders handed a signed letter to the Ministry asserting that because of increased cases of ikhtilat ix caused by increased female employees, their job have become extremely stressful and unmanageable (Zoepf, 2013). In response to this, the ISSN: 2332-6840 (Online) 2332-6832 (Print) Copyright © 2016 by authors, all rights reserved. Authors agree that this article remains permanently open access under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 International License