After scraping the ban on women driving and allowing them to travel without the shadow of male guardianship in the year 2018, Saudi Arabia has advertised train-driver jobs in a gender-neutral format for the first time ever. Around 28,000 women have applied for the 30 jobs that were advertised in the conservative kingdom.
Selected candidates will be able to drive the high-speed bullet trains between the holy cities of Mecca and Medina after being trained for around a year. The Spanish train company called the Renfe stated that it was eager to create various opportunities for women in the local business of the country. The company currently employs 80 male drivers and 50 more are still in the training program.
Saudi Arabia has seen one of the lowest female workforce participation rates all over the world. Until a few decades ago, the women of the country were only seen in altruistic roles such as teachers and medical workers and even then they had to observe strict gender segregation rules. However in the last five years, female participation has nearly doubled to almost 33 per cent after the Crown Prince of Saudi, Prince Mohammed bin Salman has opened up his kingdom to diversify the economy of Saudi Arabia. This has opened up several new opportunities for the female population who are now able to take up jobs that were previously meant for men and migrant workers only.
Despite these developments, the proportion of females working in the kingdom was about half that of men, and female unemployment was almost more than three times higher for men as per a study conducted by the United States-based Brookings Institute. This new gender-neutral approach has been seen as an attempt to repair the nation’s image in the Western countries particularly when human rights in Saudi Arabia have been under scrutiny recently. The Saudi Crown prince Bin Salman has been hoping to claim the leadership of the sustainable energy economy by peddling his nation’s renewable energy to the West as the fossil fuels are currently rapidly depleting.
The lifting of the driving ban for women is one of the few decisions taken to modernise some aspects of the society of Saudi Arabia and draw in trust and belief in the Vision 2030 programme in order to steer the Saudi economy away from oil. This move has also been seen as a move to divert attention from the recent arrests of women’s rights activists such as Basma bint Saud who is a reformist princess and the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a journalist in the year 2018. Princess Saud was only released this year after being held captive for around three months.
