Topic
women
3 articles tagged "women".
The 17%-to-36% decade: how Saudi women joined the formal economy
Female labor force participation moved from 17% in 2017 to 36.3% by Q1 2025. That's roughly 3.4 million additional women in the formal workforce in eight years — the largest such shift in any G20 economy this decade. The mechanism wasn't just one law. It was a coordinated stack of legal, financial, infrastructural, and cultural changes that compounded.
36.3%· Women in the workforce
The generation that learned to drive in their 40s: Saudi women turning 55
A Saudi woman turning 55 in 2026 was 46 when the driving ban lifted in June 2018. Some women in this cohort became grandmothers before they got driver’s licenses. They have lived through a more compressed legal and economic transformation than any other adult population segment, and the data alone doesn’t capture what that took.
36.3%· Women in the workforce
Women in authority
The female labor-force participation story traced the move from 17% to 36%. This piece traces the parallel arc that doesn’t appear in the participation curve: what happened to Saudi women’s representation in positions of authority during the same period — Shoura Council, cabinet, ambassadorial, judicial, and corporate.
≥20%· Saudi women in the Shoura Council