Since Sundip Patel began expanding his business in Saudi Arabia three years ago, he says there’s been “astounding” growth in the kingdom structurally and socially. The co-founder and CEO of AVANA Companies, a direct private commercial lender, Patel works directly with women and minority entrepreneurs to build their companies. He says that things that would have been unthinkable in Saudi Arabia not long ago are now everyday occurrences, particularly as it relates to the treatment of women.
“People are accepting that women can be breadwinners,” says Patel. “Imagine that seven, eight years ago. That was not there, but it’s there now.”
What Patel, who has lived in the region at least part-time for the past 18 years, is experiencing is the changing landscape of Saudi Arabia following the creation of Vision 2030, a government program launched by de facto ruler Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in 2016 that seeks to diversify Saudi Arabia economically, socially, and culturally. As part of that mission, many of the barriers and mores that held women back from the workforce are no longer in place. Saudi women can now drive, travel freely without a guardian, converse with men they are not married to in public, and, yes, work.
As one result of the country’s earlier sex-segregation policies, women also have proliferated in the tech sector, says Rothna Begum, legal advocacy director at the New York-based Clooney Foundation for Justice’s Waging Justice for Women initiative. Many were able to learn coding on their own because it would enable them to work without being in a mixed environment.
It remains rare to find women at the top ranks of the corporate world or government in Saudi Arabia. Just a handful of women have reached senior level cabinet positions, including Al-Shihana bint Saleh al-Azzaz, an attorney who was recently appointed by MBS to chair the Saudi Authority for Intellectual Property.
Still, it’s hard to overstate how profoundly some women’s lives have changed.
“I think the biggest structural difficulty is the amount of time it takes to change long-standing social norms and expectations,” says Tim Callen, a visiting fellow at the independent nonprofit Arab Gulf States Institute. “But they are certainly changing. When I went to Riyadh in January, a female customs agent checked my passport both going in and leaving. That was unthinkable five years ago.”
“There’s a ton of what you would consider liberalization of society,” says Begum, who now lives in the United Kingdom. “It will be less segregated than it was even five to six years ago.”
“Saudi women came from not being involved in the economy to being fully involved, and they’re making it happen,” says Patel. “It’s amazing.”
The share of women in the workforce, though it exploded in the first few years of the program, has stagnated more recently, hovering between 33% and 36% since 2020, according to the government’s statistics. Begum believes that the flattening reflects women being scared to overstep. “We’re not going to see the types of women’s rights reforms that we need to see,” says Begum. “because no one can complain, no one can advocate for anything more.”
Under that law, Saudi women must obtain a male guardian’s permission to marry, cannot divorce without petitioning a court on limited grounds, must still “obey” their husbands, and cannot abstain from sex without a husband’s approval.
All these norms put a ceiling on women’s economic freedom, advocates argue. “While some women are managing to get into workplaces and sectors of the labor market that we want, it really is up to the family and the man in charge,” Begum says. “If you are from a progressive, modern family, you might be okay, as long as you stay quiet.”
Change takes time, says Sundip Patel of AVANA. While there are more Saudi women in the workforce, there is also a lack of mentorship and networking infrastructure for them, meaning many aren’t able to level up their careers, at least not yet. Women in the C-Suite, or even the level below, remain rare, he notes. A lot can change in a decade, but even more can stay the same.
“The capability of women being sort of fully ingrained in the economy has just been very recent, 10 years,” he says. “Experience is the best teacher. So you need time to groom and cultivate this knowledge.”
